What I’m doing in that early window is something I’ve come to think of as designing the day energetically – deciding, while it’s still quiet, what kind of day I want to inhabit, before anything else gets to decide it for me.

If I don’t consciously claim the opening stretch of my day, something else in the world will claim it for me. The news might fill it. The inbox might have a say. Someone else’s urgency could influence it. Headlines, emails, other people’s agendas – they’re all standing at the edge of the morning, happy to set the emotional tone before I’ve done it myself. And then the rest of the day can easily inherit that tone. I could spend the next several hours taking action in directions I never actually chose.

So the practice is simple: make the choice consciously first.

Pick six words to shape your day

Here’s the concrete version I’ve been applying since last year.

I keep a deck of index cards, each one with a vibe word on it – such as Delight, Flow, Savor, Ignite, Immerse, Explore, and 100+ more. Some of the words are practical, some are playful, and some are sensual. The deck has a lot of range, because so does my life. I made the first batch by hand – just words that name the different energies I might want to engage with. Each card’s core vibe is in the middle of the card, and the four corners hold related words that I associate with the core vibe. All are verbs because I like to think of vibes as ways to move energy, not as frozen snapshots.

Each morning I pick six of these cards and post them up on a dedicated board in my office, as shown in the photo. The tacks have magnets on top of them, so it’s easy to swap in new cards without poking holes in them.

That’s the whole ritual. I skim the deck, notice which words give me an intuitive nudge, and choose the half-dozen I want to set the tone of the day. This morning it was Integrate, Clear, Listen, Design, Build, Stabilize – which tells me today wants to be about grounding and consolidating what’s been surging lately, not launching anything new. Another morning I might be drawn to pick cards like Ignite, Energize, and Frolic, which gives the day a completely different shape. The cards don’t dictate my tasks. They name the feeling space I want the day to have.

This morning I infused this practice into a personal life navigation app I’ve been developing, so now I can just tap the cards I want. I took pics of the cards in sets of 25 (125 cards total) and had AI extract the words and build the digital versions, including assigning emojis to each. It took all of 15 minutes to add this feature to my app, thanks to AI handling the coding.

But the analog version works just as well, and there’s something nice about handling physical cards on a table. If you want to try this yourself, you don’t need anything but index cards and a pen (I used colored markers).

It’s a choice about energy, not output

I experience life as the movement of energy – currents I can either let run on default or deliberately shape. Early in the day is one of the highest-leverage times to shape this energy because whatever tone gets set early tends to propagate forward. A morning that starts in reactivity tends to stay reactive. A morning that starts with wonder and delight tends to influence the day very positively.

When I let someone or something else set the tone, I’m basically outsourcing the emotional design of my whole day to whatever happens to hit me hardest. I’d rather design it myself – not to control the day’s details, but to flow with a vibescape I actually chose.

And here’s the part that surprised me: designing the day is mostly about subtraction, not addition. It’s not just the vibe cards I choose that matter – it’s the ones I notice and don’t choose. In practice I often pick about 10-12 cards in my first pass, and the most interesting decisions are those final few that I release. These decisions help me tighten the focus of each day by calling out what I’m deliberately choosing not to infuse. This simple practice of consciously choosing my core energies for the day is more helpful than you might assume, especially in terms of focus.

Try it tomorrow

If any of this resonates, here’s a light version to try.

Tonight, write a dozen or so vibe words on index cards – whatever energies you’d actually want to feel in a day. Tomorrow morning, before you touch your phone, pick a few. Sit with them for a couple of minutes. Then let the day unfold from there.

You might be surprised how much a day will reshape itself around a tone you chose on purpose. I’ve seen on many occasions how these vibes can weave themselves into my day in surprising ways, even when I’m only loosely aware of them. It’s when I go to replace them the next day that I often reflect back on how they shaped that previous day.

I’m re-establishing some positive rhythms this month – more running, more creative engagement, more deliberate design of how my days actually flow – and this small practice has quietly become one of my favorites in the past year. It costs almost nothing. It’s a potent defense against distracting influences. And it lets me flow through each day as something I’m composing rather than something that’s merely happening to me.

The day is going to take a shape either way. Might as well be the one you chose.

Instead of walking through every feature or detail, I wanted to share more of the heart of CGC – what kind of space it is, why I continue tending it with so much care, and what I especially want to emphasize for this next year.

CGC is a high-trust, participatory self-development community for growth-oriented people who want more than ideas, insights, or solo reflection. It’s a place for turning inner growth into lived experience – with real support, honest connection, exploration, creativity, pleasure, belonging, and meaningful shifts in your actual life.

In the video, I talk about CGC as a collection of permission containers – spaces where people can open up more honestly, explore deeper layers of themselves, and receive caring human intelligence from others who genuinely want to help.

This year’s pulse is about landing more of that growth into life.

Less circling. More improvement.

Less forcing. More harmony and flow.

Less doing everything alone. More support, connection, and real human warmth.

I also share more about the heartspace of CGC – the intimacy, trust, friendship, encouragement, exploration, pleasure, creative flow, and identity expansion that can happen when growth is supported inside a caring community instead of being processed only in private.

If you’ve been considering CGC, this video should give you a clearer feel for the kind of space you’d be entering.

The deadline to join CGC Year 10 is tomorrow: Thursday, May 7 at 11:59 PM Pacific.

Your membership begins as soon as you join and continues through April 30, 2027.

I’d love to welcome you in.

Learn more and join CGC Year 10 here.

Synchronize is our monthly orienting call where we check in with the current pulse of the group. What are people moving through? What kind of support would help this month?

Today’s call also gave me a clearer sense of what wants to happen in CGC this year – not as a rigid plan, but as an evolving direction.

Some of the words and themes that came up were:

connection
belonging
intimacy
action
momentum
relationship
ease
rest
integration
calm
openness
experimentation
wonder
surprise
courage
trust
devotion
creative flow
sharing the half-baked stuff
sharing more of our real journeys

That provides some nice clarity about how the CGC Year 10 energy is opening for us.

It also helped clarify the kinds of people we’d love to invite into CGC this year.

Not everyone. CGC has never been meant for everyone.

But if this kind of space would genuinely support you, I’d love for you to recognize yourself more clearly in the invitation.

A Year of Connection and Belonging

One of the strongest intentions for CGC Year 10 is to help the group become an even stronger space for real connection and belonging.

A lot of people are doing plenty of inner work these days.

They’re reading. Journaling. Watching videos. Listening to podcasts. Thinking about their patterns. Trying to improve their habits. Trying to understand themselves.

That can all be useful.

But there’s a certain kind of growth that doesn’t really activate until you bring your actual self into relationship with other self-aware, growth-oriented, action-taking people.

Not your polished self.
Not your “here’s my impressive update” self.
Not your “I’ve already figured this out” self.

Your real self – the part of you that is still experimenting.
Still sensing what wants to change.
Still learning how to trust your own deeper signals.

That’s one of the things we want CGC to support more strongly this year: people being able to show up in a real way, while they’re still in motion.

You don’t have to arrive fully formed – it’s actually better if you don’t.

Fully formed people are usually either done growing or pretending.

More Action, Less Solo Circling

Another strong theme from today’s Synchronize call was action.

Not frantic action.
Not grinding.
Not chasing.
Not hustling harder until your heart feels like it’s trapped in a cage.

More like: let’s stop circling the same things alone.

Let’s bring the stuck points into the room.

The decision you keep postponing.
The relationship pattern that needs attention.
The creative project that keeps almost becoming real.
The part of life that feels cluttered, heavy, vague, or unfinished.
The invitation you keep not sending.
The body signal you keep ignoring.
The truth you keep nibbling instead of claiming.

CGC works best when people bring what’s actually happening.

A decision.
A desire.
A transition.
A stuck place.
A longing.
A half-baked idea.
A request for support.

Then we can work with it together.

One intention for Year 10 is to help the club become a better bridge from insight to lived movement.

Not just more self-awareness.

More like:

I had the conversation.
I made the request.
I cleared the old thing.
I rested to replenish my energy.
I reached out.
I started the project.
I stopped pretending that old path still fits.
I let myself be seen.
I let life help me more.
I completed.
I cleared.
I released.

That’s the kind of progress I love seeing in CGC.

Sometimes it’s big and dramatic. Sometimes it’s beautifully simple. Both count.

Creative, Open-Hearted, Relational People

We’d especially love to welcome more people this year who are creative, open-hearted, socially warm, and willing to experiment with life.

By creative, I don’t necessarily mean professional artists, although we always have some of those in CGC each year.

I mean people who relate to life as something they’re actively shaping.

Writers, artists, entrepreneurs, coaches, weirdly brilliant nerds, intuitive explorers, relationship builders, community-minded people, project starters, experience designers, sensitive humans with unusual inner worlds – yes, please… more of these people.

People who have ideas they haven’t fully landed yet.

People who want to publish something, build something, host something, heal something, explore something, simplify something, or open a new doorway in life.

People who are willing to say:

“This isn’t finished yet, but here’s where I am.”

That kind of honesty is powerful in our group, and the group energy is especially good at helping such people move into meaningful next steps.

This gives other people permission to be real too. One person’s progress often inspires others to move into action.

I’d rather be in a room with sincere half-baked liveliness than polished pretense. CGC is a club where energy loves to move into action, not just circulate in possibility space. And given the recent Spirit Airlines news, there’s a timely reminder here: spirit is wonderful, but the quality of the journey matters too – and eventually, the plane needs to land.

A Healthier Relationship With Support

A lot of thoughtful people are oddly bad at receiving support.

They can be very good at helping others.
Very good at thinking.
Very good at coping.
Very good at being self-sufficient.

But self-sufficiency can quietly become isolation.

One of my intentions for CGC Year 10 is to normalize receiving more support.

Bring the thing you need help with.

Bring the part that feels unclear.

Bring the place where you’d love perspective, encouragement, mirroring, truth, warmth, or a nudge.

This doesn’t mean we turn CGC into a therapy space. It isn’t that.

It’s a growth club. A live, relational, participatory space. A place for adults who are willing to engage with honesty, responsibility, curiosity, and care.

But it does mean you don’t have to keep pretending that your life is a solo engineering project.

Humans need supportive rooms.

Humans need honest mirrors.

Humans need other humans who can say, “Yes, I get that,” or “Have you considered this?” or “That sounds like the old pattern talking,” or “I think you already know what you want here.”

That kind of support can change the direction of a whole month – and sometimes a whole life. People often become bolder and braver when they have a rock-solid base of social support. They take more action. They hesitate less. They trust themselves more.

Stretch, But Don’t Strain

Another intention for this year is to keep CGC stretchy but humane.

I want people to grow.
I want people to experiment.
I want people to become braver, warmer, more expressive, more honest, and more alive.

But I don’t want the group field to feel like pressure.

A good growth space should help people breathe.

This year I want CGC to hold a healthy range:

• Support when life feels messy and you don’t want to sort through it alone.
• Flow when your energy is scattered and you want to turn insight into forward motion.
• Release when something is complete, stale, heavy, or ready to leave your life.
• Embody when you’ve been too much in your head and your body wants a vote.
• Touch when relationships, friendship, trust, or real human contact need more care.
• Wonder when the world feels too narrow and possibility wants to open again.
• Play when life has become too serious and delight needs a place to land.
• Connect when you want warmth, belonging, laughter, and deeper connection with your fellow CGCers.
• Synchronize when we want to sense the month together and choose a shared direction.

That’s the new rhythm of CGC Year 10.

It’s not a rigid curriculum. It’s a living structure.

We’ll keep listening to what people are actually moving through, and we’ll shape the flow accordingly.

Who Will Probably Feel at Home Here

You may be a strong match for CGC Year 10 if you want more connection, support, honesty, and aliveness in your life.

You’ll probably feel at home if you’re willing to show up live, be on camera, and participate in good faith.

You’ll probably fit well if you like thoughtful people, warm conversation, personal growth, experimentation, emotional honesty, practical movement, curiosity, and a bit of wonder.

You don’t have to be extroverted.

You don’t have to be perfectly confident.

You don’t have to have your life neatly arranged and color-coded.

But you do need to be willing to bring your real self into the room.

CGC is probably not a fit if you mainly want private content to consume in the background, if you prefer hiding, if you don’t want live interaction, or if you want a rigid step-by-step formula where someone else tells you exactly what to do with your life.

It’s also not a good match for cynical, contemptuous, cruel, or dehumanizing energy.

We’re creating a warm room together.

That means the quality of the people matters.

My Deeper Intention

My deeper intention for CGC Year 10 is simple:

I want CGC to help people stop growing alone and start living more fully – in motion, in connection, and in real life.

More honest conversations.
More invitations.
More warmth.
More courage.
More grounded action.
More creative experiments.
More relational aliveness.
More support that actually fits what people are moving through now.

I want CGC to be a place where people can bring their lives into the room and feel something shift because they did.

Not every call needs to be profound.

Some calls may be playful. Some may be practical. Some may be tender. Some may be surprising. Some may be clarifying in a way that seems small at the time but creates powerful ripples.

That’s real growth.

Not always fireworks. Sometimes it’s a door finally opening because someone had the courage to touch the handle and ponder, “What if?”

Join Us for CGC Year 10

Enrollment for Conscious Growth Club Year 10 is open now, and it closes Thursday, May 7 at 11:59 PM Pacific.

This is our only opening for new members this year, so if CGC feels aligned, this is the window to join us. After enrollment closes, the next planned opening won’t be until April 2027.

This new CGC year runs from May 1, 2026 through April 30, 2027, and your membership begins as soon as you join.

If this feels like the kind of space you’ve been wanting – more honest, more alive, more connected, more supportive, and more worth showing up for – you’re warmly invited to join us.

If you’ve been craving a place where growth feels more relational, honest, and alive, this may be your year to join us inside.

Here’s the full invite page:

Conscious Growth Club Year 10

If you read the invitation and feel a clean yes, trust that.

We’d love to welcome more creative, open-hearted, growth-oriented people into the room this year.

Especially if you’re ready to bring more of your real life with you.

CGC is our private, growth-oriented community for people who want more honesty, courage, support, connection, and meaningful forward movement in their lives – not as some kind of self-improvement grind, but as a richer way to live.

We’re beginning our 10th CGC year on May 1st, and you’re warmly invited to join us.

If you’ve been craving a more grounded and supportive space for your personal growth journey, this may be a very good year to come in.

CGC is especially for people who want to keep growing, but who don’t want to do it alone or only through passive learning. It’s a live, interactive, human space where members bring real life into the room – goals, transitions, stuck points, creative projects, relationship challenges, lifestyle shifts, health intentions, business questions, emotional patterns, and those strange “I know something needs to change, but I don’t know what yet” moments.

That kind of growth is much easier when you have a room of thoughtful, caring, self-aware people to explore with.

A lot of people try to navigate their growth with too much isolation. They read books, watch videos, journal, think, plan, and chat with AI now and then. Those can all be useful, but at some point the inner work often needs a real human relational space to deepen and advance.

It helps to be seen and acknowledged by like-hearted people.

It helps to hear how other people are navigating similar challenges.

It helps to share what’s really going on without having to polish it first.

It helps to be welcomed and received as a vibrant member of a rich social community.

It helps to be in a space where growth is normal – where people aren’t shocked that you’re rethinking your work, your relationships, your habits, your identity, your emotional patterns, your lifestyle, or your whole relationship with life.

That’s a big part of what CGC provides. What’s unusual in the outside world – conscious growth – is totally normal in our space.

CGC is not a therapy group. It’s not a social media group. It’s not a pile of static content. It’s a live community and growth environment with a strong emphasis on participation, connection, honesty, and practical support.

During Year 10, we’ll have several dozen live Zoom calls together, mostly around 90 minutes each. These calls are designed to help members reflect, connect, get unstuck, clarify intentions, share progress, explore meaningful questions, and keep translating insight into real-life movement.

We’ll also continue using our private member forums and CGC portal, so you can stay connected between calls, access courses and resources, and participate at your own pace.

What I especially love about CGC is the range of what members bring into the space. One person may be navigating a career transition. Another may be working on health or fitness. Someone else may be deepening their relationship life, exploring a creative project, or trying to bring more courage and truth into their daily decisions.

The common thread is not that everyone has the same goals.

The common thread is willingness.

Willingness to tell the truth.

Willingness to keep growing.

Willingness to participate.

Willingness to be seen.

Willingness to support others while also receiving support.

That makes a big difference.

CGC tends to work best for people who already have some self-development experience and who are ready for a more interactive, higher-trust environment. You don’t need to be perfect, polished, or constantly productive. You don’t need to have your whole life figured out. But you do need to be willing to show up honestly and engage with the room.

This year we’re making CGC feel even more practical, relational, and alive – with more emphasis on translating meaningful intentions into daily life. More real support. More personalized engagement. More warmth. More meaningful connection. More growth that actually impacts daily life and results.

If that sounds good to you, please take a look at the invitation page here:

Join Conscious Growth Club Year 10

Enrollment is open now and closes May 7th at 11:59 PM Pacific time.

CGC Year 10 officially begins May 1st and runs through April 30, 2027. When you join, you’ll get access right away, so you can begin exploring the member portal and community space before the new CGC year begins.

The price is $3333 for new members and for returning past members.

If you’re a renewing member, your renewal price is $1111.

If you feel a clear yes, I’d love to welcome you into the room for Year 10.

And if you read the invitation page and sense that it’s not your space, that’s perfectly okay too. CGC is intentionally not for everyone. It works best when people self-select honestly. That honest self-selection has worked really well for us, helping to create a community of members who want the full, rich, consciously engaged experience.

If some part of you has been wanting a more alive, honest, supportive growth environment – a place where you can keep evolving with thoughtful people who actually care – then I encourage you to listen to that signal.

This is a beautiful year to join us.

CGC is a live, year-long growth space for people who want deeper connection, real support, clearer direction, and a life that feels better to actually live.

This year’s CGC structure is designed to be simpler, more participatory, and more closely attuned to what members are actually moving through. You’ll get several dozen live Zoom calls throughout the year, access to the private CGC forum, and access to the full CGC content library.

CGC works best for people who are willing to show up live, be on camera, participate honestly, and help create a warm, high-trust room together.

This is not mainly a content library to consume privately. It’s a living space with real people, real conversations, and real support over time.

CGC Year 10 officially runs from May 1, 2026 through April 30, 2027.

Enrollment closes Thursday, May 7 at 11:59 PM Pacific.

Read the full invitation here:

Join Conscious Growth Club Year 10

I’d love to welcome a beautifully aligned group into this next CGC year.

We’ve been shaping this next CGC year differently than some previous years. The biggest shift is that we’re making CGC more responsive, adaptive, and directly focused on supporting our members as we navigate the needs and challenges of today and the unfolding future.

Instead of overbuilding so much of the CGC year in advance, we’ve been designing Year 10 around a smaller set of stronger live containers that can stay closer to what people are actually moving through in real life. That means more flexibility, more personalization, and more relevant and timely support.

I want this next CGC year to do a better job of meeting people where they actually are.

Year 9 was a huge buffet of co-exploration. For Year 10 our core focus is on translating emotional desires into lived reality – with special attention given to flow, embodiment, belonging, and harmony. Yet we’re still baking in plenty of capacity for wonder and play too.

A lot of people don’t need more information right now. They need support. They need connection. They need a better place to bring their real problems and challenges. They need help with the parts of life that feel unclear, heavy, overdue, lonely, or sluggish. They need room to breathe, space to tell the truth, and genuine solutions.

This kind of personalized, adaptive, caring, intelligent social support matters even more right now because life is changing so fast.

AI is accelerating everything. And this will surely continue impacting our lives in unpredictable ways. Hence the increasing need for flexible, adaptive, and evolving support.

Our self-development needs are different today than they were a few years ago. This is why we keep evolving and refreshing CGC each year. This year it’s all about deep, rich, timely, personalized support.

This wild rate of change can be exciting, liberating, and creative. It can also stir up anxiety, overwhelm, disorientation, and a sense that reality is getting weirder faster than many people know how to metabolize. AI is only one part of the picture. The larger world is full of rapid shifts, social fragmentation, emotional overload, ideological rigidity, and a lot of people trying to navigate all of that in isolation.

That’s a difficult combo to deal with, even for people who invest a lot in self-development. Yet it also opens us to worlds of new opportunities like we’ve never experienced before in our lives.

We especially need to stay emotionally secure and centered to capture these opportunities and not feel like we’re drowning in threats.

It’s foolhardy to try to navigate all of this alone. Social media chaos and AI slop just makes people feel even more confused, fragmented, and overloaded. So having a strong, smart, conscious community in our lives matters more today, not less.

Not just any community. Not some random group. Not a passive membership where people hide and lurk and never really show up.

I mean a living, conscious, participatory community where people actually connect, get to know each other, support each other, and move through change together in a grounded, honest, intelligent , and harmonious way.

That’s the direction we’re betting bigger on for CGC Year 10 – strong, devoted, caring, community support.

Honest but gentle. Strong yet compassionate. Bold yet understanding.

Our Year 10 structure includes live calls for support, flow, embodiment, relationships, wonder, play, release, and more – all designed to help bridge from aspirational vibes into real life actions and results. I want the club to do a better job of helping members not only explore and reflect, but also to land the plane. Make clearer decisions. Improve relationships. Let go of what no longer fits. Feel more like themselves again. Get moving where life has gotten sticky.

I also want our CGC space to feel warmer and more intimate than ever. Hence we’ll be infusing more casual hangout calls this year, so members can enjoy more time connecting with me, with Rachelle, and with each other – as friends. Rachelle and I both participate very actively in the community because we’re devoted to it.

Tomorrow I’ll be sharing the full invitation for CGC Year 10, but here’s a little peek:

I’m really happy with how this next CGC year is taking shape. It feels cleaner, stronger, more timely, and very human. It’s such a beautiful place inside already, but as our members keep exploring, learning, and growing, CGC keeps advancing too.

If you’ve been wanting a more supportive, more connected, more alive way to move through your next chapter of life, I think you’ll want to take a look when the invitation opens tomorrow.

Speaking of Openings…

I also want to mention that we’re still taking signups for our in-person Open event in Las Vegas (April 28-30):

StevePavlina.com/Open

This event is coming up very soon, and I’m feeling especially excited about it. Many CGCers will be there.

Here’s a little visual peek at the vibe of Open.

Open is for people who want a life that really matches their heart.

A life of presence.
Honesty.
Connection.
Inner peace.
Freedom from carrying so much alone.

Open is for people who are tired of living too much in their heads or staying too tightly wrapped around old roles, old pressures, and old forms of self-protection.

Open is for people who want to reconnect with what feels true, alive, meaningful, and deeply human.

I’ll be guiding this event as a warm and immersive in-person experience here in Las Vegas, and because the group is going to be pretty intimate, the people who attend are going to get plenty of personal attention.

A smaller group means more space to connect, more room to be seen, more real interaction, and more ability to support each person directly. So if you’ve been drawn to the event but were perhaps wondering what the vibe would be like, I think it’s shaping up to be a very special kind of experience.

Not crowded.
Not performative.
Not one-size-fits-all.

More personal.
More spacious.
More human.

If you’ve been craving a reset, a softening, a clearing, a stronger sense of inner alignment, or simply a chance to spend a few days in a room with thoughtful, open-hearted people who care about living more consciously, I’d love for you to join us.

You can read more and sign up here:

StevePavlina.com/Open

I recommend watching the invitation video at the top of that page first.

So that’s the update for today.

CGC Year 10 opens tomorrow.
Open is still open.
And I might best describe what I’m feeling right now as pre-delight. I feel like I’m wrapped inside a beautiful Sphere of Love as Open and CGC Year 10 get closer day by day.

If you really want to go big with positive change this year (especially the heart-opening kind), join us at Open, immerse yourself in our supportive Sphere of Love for three days, and also join us for CGC Year 10. That will send your life along a beautiful new path – a path that makes your heart happy.

There’s a lot changing in the world right now. You don’t have to face it alone.

I’ve been shaping the new CGC year with a more robust and flexible structure that I think will serve us really well. The focus is on creating a more supportive, participatory, and adaptive experience – with strong live call formats, personalized support, real connection, and plenty of space for meaningful growth and integration over the course of the year.

If you’ve been feeling drawn to join us, or if you’re considering renewing, tomorrow is the day the invitation goes live.

CGC only opens for a short window once each year for new members to join. This will be our only joining window for 2026 – after this we won’t open again till April 2027.

Here’s quick summary graphic just to give you a little peek.

I also connect this with Open, the new live event we’re doing in Las Vegas next week (April 28-30).

If you’d like to explore Open too, you can learn more about it here:

StevePavlina.com/Open

If it resonates, you can learn more about Open here:

StevePavlina.com/Open

Reflective Questions

Do you feel free? Do you enjoy enough freedom in your life?

Would you say that your life feels delightful? Do you have a lot pleasure and happiness in your life? Do you love and appreciate the life you get to live each day?

Do you feel supported by Life? Do you feel that Life takes really good care of you – like it meets all your needs and then some?

Do you feel at peace within yourself? Do you feel at peace with the world you inhabit?

Do you feel that your life fits your heart?

Are you in love?

Do you feel that you’re really good at receiving many different kinds of gifts from Life? Like there’s always something wonderful coming up.

Do you enjoy one or more close friendships – with people who see you, know you, and love you as you are?

Do you feel seen, loved, held, and cared for by Life?

Do you feel like you’re on a really devoted path through life? Do you feel positively engaged with how you’re living? Do you have the right level of stimulation and motivation to enjoy a nice sense of flow?

And… Do you trust Life? Do you trust this Reality? How strong is that trust?

So what came through as you reflected? Are you enjoying a delightfully harmonious flow in your relationship with life? Is there some room for improvement here? Or does it seem unrealistic to feel loved, delighted, happy, positively stimulated, and beautifully supported by Life?

What’s your current truth here?

Cooperating with Life’s Intelligence

To create a really harmonious life, you need Life’s cooperation, don’t you? It’s not really meant to be something you figure out and do all by yourself. Harmony is something you’re invited into – by Life – when Life signals that you’re ready for it.

To cooperate with Life in this way requires that you trust Life. It’s pretty hard to harmonize with something you don’t trust. What you’re really choosing to trust here is the intelligence that flows through Life and Reality.

So what you’re actually seeking to harmonize with is intelligence – more specifically the currents of intelligence that flow through the Reality around you. Creating a harmonious life is a matter of aligning your own best intelligence with the intelligence of the Reality that you inhabit. And this requires being sensitive to those currents of intelligence and paying careful attention to them.

Now when we reach a certain point in life, Life reaches out to invite us into a new level of harmony. Often this involves letting go of an old path that no longer feels harmonious. We feel a disconnect rising up, such as feelings of agitation to want to change something, even if we don’t know exactly what to change.

The Key Skill of Orienting

What actually wants to change here is our orientation towards Life.

Life is an evolving intelligence, and so are we as individuals, and now and then we may fall out of sync, much like two people can fall out of sync during a conversation. This is when an invitation can emerge to reorient ourselves and get back in sync. This kind of orienting is a skill set, and it can be learned, developed, and practiced. It’s a wickedly important skill set for a world that doesn’t sit still and keeps shifting. People who don’t consciously develop and practice these skills are likely to be in for a very rough ride, if they aren’t already succumbing to that now.

How can you assess your current Life orienting skills? Review the reflective questions above. These questions serve to reveal the quality of your orienting skills and how well you’re currently applying them. They help you get a more honest picture of how well you’re cooperating with Life… or if you’ve fallen out of sync. And if you have fallen out of sync, don’t panic. It happens.

Receiving Life’s Gifts

What I can tell you is that this is shift into greater harmony is very connected with a willingness and an openness to receive more from Life without feeling like we have to earn it with effort.

A telltale sign that we’re in harmony and in sync with Life is that Life is very generous with us. In this place of beingness, it feels like Life keeps showering us with gifts. It’s a place of feeling deliciously loved by Life.

Sometimes that shift comes from exhaustion or exasperation with over-stressing and over-working ourselves – like doing hustle culture for a while – until we finally conclude there’s a gotta be a better way to live.

Where this often starts is with a sense of Wonder, so that’s something I want to invite you into right now. I invite you to Wonder: Could it be possible that Life could take much better care of you and make your life feel a whole lot lighter, a whole lot freer, even a whole lot luckier, if you were able to let yourself receive more?

Will you let Life help you create more harmony? Could it be that simple?

Yeah, in a way…

But sometimes it’s hard to let go of old limits in our thinking and allow that help to flow through. That’s our challenge – to say yes when Life offers us a harmony upgrade. That’s a big part of the skill set of orienting – recognizing that yes there is a better way and letting that flow through without blocking, declining, or deflecting it.

Life checks in now and then to see if harmony is really important enough to us to receive it, and if Life sees that we’d rather prioritize something else, it just holds off till we’re ready. And Life is immensely patient with us, waiting and waiting till we’re ready to get back in sync.

Help Is Offered

My own Life has felt really harmonious lately, especially in the past few years. I just turned 55 on April 14, and I feel so light, lively, and energetic. I wouldn’t say that my relationship with Life is easy per se, but it is harmonious – in the sense that one can enjoy the thrill of riding a galloping Fire Horse.

This year I sensed a really interesting invitation from Life flowing through, which was to host a space where I help people improve in this area together – where everyone arrives with the intention to make their lives more harmonious. So we’re on the same page because we all want more harmony. I knew this would be an awesome group energy to engage with, so I said yes to the assignment.

By taking this on, I’m learning a great deal more about harmony and how to sync with Life more consciously too. This has helped me significantly upgrade my own orientation skills and discover more nuances and subtleties within them.

We’re doing this in the form of a live, in person event. It’s called Open. Just that one word. Open.

We’re opening to receiving more. More flow. More freedom. More flexibility. More ease. More lightness. More friendship. More love. More cooperation.

We’re hosting this for three days in Las Vegas on April 28th through 30th, so it’s this month.

Open is an invitation to increase the level of harmony in your life, and to work with like-minded and like-hearted people who want the same. It’s a deep inner journey into a very personal reorientation process.

At Open I’ll guide you through a series of orientation containers, each with a different theme and different skills to practice within. These containers are very thoughtfully and lovingly crafted to help reorient to Wonder. To Intelligence. To Trust. To Freedom. To Embodiment. To Magnetism. To Love. To Friendship. To Pleasure. And more… I want to keep some of these delights a surprise.

So this is intended as an offer of help from Reality. It’s a chance to orient yourself to Life differently.

Not recorded. Not streamed. In-person. This month.

You’ve got to be in the room really feeling it. Your body has to come along. Note that Embodiment is one of our core containers. Open is an experience for your body too, not just your mind and heart.

A Preview – Come Inside the Room

Open is very experiential. It’s not content-based. NOT 3 days of lecture.

As the name suggests, Open is a space of opening into greater harmony – both within yourself and with Life. These arise as a package deal.

Open is a very deep inner journey. And this journey invites you to reorient yourself to Life, specifically to create a lighter and more harmonious relationship with Life where you get to receive a lot more. Think of it like Life offering you its hand and asking if you’d like to be best friends from now on.

You can expect a very warm and welcoming atmosphere. Very compassionate. Very human. Very intimate. Very accepting. We’re not using social pressure. Every exercise is by consent.

I hope you like handpan music because we’ll have some live music with a handpan while you’re doing some reflective exercises.

So we’re creating a very gentle, very yin space that encourages emergence – especially the emergence of new perspectives and new possibilities.

The energy of Open is very warm – but not tame. Open invites you to take a deep and honest look into yourself and your orientation towards Life – and to then translate that into new understanding and new decisions. So Open is also very grounded and practical because harmony is something you live within day to day. In the final segment we’ll spend a good bit of time on integration, so you can start putting into practice what you’ve discovered.

Hence, Open is designed to be a very supportive space to reexamine and then rebuild your overall orientation towards Life. That’s a big deal. It’s meant to be life-changing.

If you’re seeing this invitation, then as a representative of Life – some people have referred to me as the Emissary of the Simulation – I’m personally inviting you to come to Vegas. Let me guide you through this inner journey experience for 3 days at the end of this month.

Join Us in Las Vegas

Open is happening at the New York-New York Hotel in Las Vegas. That’s right on the Las Vegas Strip. It’s a 10-minute ride from the airport. It’s literally on the same street as the airport, right on Tropicana Avenue.

The price is $888. You can think of it as three vertical infinity signs.

I can’t predict how many people will go to Open, but based on our room size, we can accommodate up to about 150 people, so it ought to be a fairly intimate event.

And I want you to know that I’m really pouring my heart into this one – because getting to a place of better harmony with Life has so much to do with dropping into our hearts and getting our mental decisions to really respect our feelings.

If this sounds appealing to you, you can read the full invitation and sign up to join us in Las Vegas at StevePavlina.com/Open.

I hope to see you there. It’s this month, so it’s nearly here already. The close proximity is part of the invitation, so that the people who show up are the ones who feel the most ready to have this kind of experience together. The invitation and the actual experience are meant to be very close in time.

I can tell you it’s going to be a lot of fun too!

Do you want to get to a place of receiving more from life? Life is offering that. Tune in to yourself and see if you’re ready for more harmony and more receiving. I encourage you to trust whatever decision comes up for you.

Registration for Open is now live at StevePavlina.com/Open.

This is a new, in-person, 3-day experience we’re hosting April 28–30, 2026 in Las Vegas. I’ve been sharing about this for the past few weeks, and now the doors are open, so you can see the full details and sign up if you feel called to join us.

Open isn’t a content-based experience. It’s a shared inner journey focused on harmonizing your relationship with yourself and with Life.

Open is in-person only – not recorded or streamed. We’re prioritizing intimacy.

Registration just opened, and the event begins in two weeks, so this is a short window. The reasons why are shared in the full invitation:

StevePavlina.com/Open

Take a look and see if Open calls to you. It’s unique.

I’m delighted to announce that we just opened registrations for Open – a new 3-day, in-person experience happening April 28–30, 2026 in Las Vegas.

Yes, this month – just two weeks from now.

Open isn’t a typical workshop or seminar. It’s an inner-directed, experiential space designed to help you explore and harmonize your relationship with yourself… and with Life.

We’ll be working with reflection, gentle movement, emotional awareness, and shared presence – creating a space that’s warm, real, and deeply human.

The focus is on opening to more clarity, more connection, more freedom and flow, and a more harmonious way of living.

This will be a relatively small, in-person gathering – maximum capacity of about 150 people. We won’t be recording or streaming it since we’re prioritizing intimacy.

Take a look. You’ll know if it’s for you.

StevePavlina.com/Open

The magnetic core of Open is very simple. It’s harmony.

Inner harmony within yourself. Outer harmony with your reality.

That’s a big ask in today’s world, is it not?

Harmony Made Real

During my 20s I discovered how easy it was to unbalance my life by elevating certain pursuits at the expense of others, such as by overworking and under-playing.

Freedom, growth, and creativity mattered to me a great deal, so I spent years figuring out how to live in alignment with these values. Now that I’m in my 50s (about to turn 55 this month), I feel very grateful that my younger self put in the effort to make this work on a practical level. It wasn’t easy but it was doable.

Another challenge was figuring out how to attune to abundance and resourcefulness. That was a nice success that harmonized well with my other priorities. Eventually I created the Deep Abundance Integration course to guide people through a 30-day deep dive on that. It’s been rewarding to watch people go through this kind of shift, which really isn’t about money – it’s about whether we’re ready to trust life more. Abundance is something we receive as a gift from life when we’re ready for it, not something we need to chase.

One of the most beautiful gains was infusing my life with lots of love. My wife Rachelle and I have been together 16+ years now, and we’re very much in love with each other. Our wedding anniversary is tomorrow. I’ve had the good fortune of spending most of my adult life in two very loving, long-term relationships. My first marriage ended many years ago, but I never stopped harmonizing with love.

Lately I’ve been practicing loving everyone. A powerful realization was that I don’t need anyone’s permission to love them. I can feel love in any direction I want, and it turns out that harmonizing with love in lots of different directions has been really good and healthy for me.

I also worked on harmonizing with growth, pleasure, play, wonder, embodiment, exploration, contribution, and more. Inviting everything to come in together was even more helpful than trying to do it piecemeal. Ask for it all.

This vibes-first approach has served me well for decades. To this day I still find it crucial to run my life by making vibrational decisions first, such as by choosing cooperation over competition or by choosing intelligence over disappointment. That works so well across all areas of life. The net result is a very satisfying, pleasing, and pleasurable life.

If this were impractical, I expect my life would have fallen apart many years ago, but it’s been the opposite. In recent years the harmony has grown even stronger and deeper. This wasn’t entirely of my doing on a personal level. Much of it came through as a series of gifts, each arriving when I was ready to receive it.

As I worked on harmonizing different areas of my life even more, I found that this harmonizing process began taking on a life of its own. I sensed a deeper intelligence working cooperatively with me. I created the Submersion course to help others explore this way of engaging with life too.

This isn’t about working harder or pushing more. My life is the opposite of hustle culture. I enjoy plenty of stimulating action, but this is harmoniously balanced with other vibes that support my best life as well. Rachelle and I started this week by getting massages first thing on Monday morning, so we began our workweek with relaxation and pleasure. Then we hosted a Zoom call together in Conscious Growth Club – about the intelligence of embodiment. See how nicely that fits?

What opens up the flow of such gifts from life? What invites greater harmony to surface? There are many answers to this, but one of those keys is trust.

In order to really trust this reality, we have to trust that reality is intelligent, not just random, chaotic, or rules-based. And then as we trust that reality is intelligent, another big question is how to engage with this intelligence and harmonize with it. That’s been a huge part of my life journey for many years. This awareness is infused into how I live every day now. Each day, multiple times a day, I seek to orient to this intelligence and engage with it cooperatively. And I dare say that it’s been taking really good care of me lately.

The Limits of Personal Effort

A while back I discovered that there’s a limit as to how harmonious my life could become through personal effort. I sense that’s because effort itself tends to be disharmonious. If we try too hard to harmonize with life, that eventually becomes counter-productive. Hence if we really want to create and live truly harmonious lives in cooperation with life’s intelligence, there comes a point where we must relinquish effort. This involves letting go and releasing whatever prevents us from receiving more gifts. I’ve had a lot of lessons about letting go of old limits.

At some point, greater harmony asks for relaxation, trust, receptivity, and surrender into a deeper organizing intelligence. I would not call this a leap of faith. For me it’s been a journey of sensing and attuning. The next steps reveal themselves as I’m ready for them.

In recent years I’ve especially been paying attention to when life seems to be inviting me to experience or explore something new or to engage with reality differently. And wow does it do that a lot. I just had to open myself to notice this more.

I couldn’t have engineered my relationship with Rachelle into being. I would not have asked for a long-distance, international relationship with a Canadian. No dating app would have brought this through. This relationship has been such a huge gift. Every day it’s a gift. We’re so very good for each other – so much love, caring, passion, fun, affection, adventure, laughter, and more. We are each other’s best friends too. I love being married to my best friend.

My life has been awash in daily “I love you’s” for many years now, not just literally but also energetically. I feel so richly supported by life. And I must admit that a lot of this wasn’t of my doing, at least not in terms of pursuing and achieving goals like you might see someone do in a movie.

So many of the great turning points in my life happened by way of invitation. I couldn’t always pinpoint what specifically triggered these invites to come through other than to acknowledge that they showed up when I was receptive enough and ready to receive them.

I see a spine of upgrades throughout my life taking the form of invitations coming through at the right times. An invitation to go to an event. To join a group. To do my first ayahuasca ceremony. Sometimes it took courage to say yes, and I was richly rewarded when I leaned in and trusted life more. Part of me could sense when an invitation was important for my life path.

Some invitations were internal. I felt an inner sense of wonder about something new, leaned in with some exploration, and gave it room to breathe. What would it be like to spend 30 days in a row going to Disneyland? To have loving sex every day for four months? To feel an urge to travel and be on a plane within a day or two? Such experiences are wonderful and also mind-blowing. They reveal so much.

Now I understand that I can simply let life say “I love you” without my having to earn it. That’s a frequency of beingness that we can allow to come into our lives when we’re ready for it. This is where much greater harmonies start to emerge, whereby each aspect of life begins to fit together like puzzle pieces.

Even when I see parts of the outer world delving into what looks chaotic, I still see the intelligence flowing through it. This life is a place of exploration and lots of lessons, and we’re all engaging with different aspects of it. It’s all meaningful.

As I see people exploring very different frequency ranges, I feel increasingly clear about my own – a path infused with love, harmony, intelligence, cooperation, and delight.

Your Invitation to Open

Open is a space designed to support the emergence of greater harmony in your life. It’s a space of inviting, allowing, and receiving. At Open you’ll be guided through a sequence of containers to help you open to the flow of life’s intelligent cooperation and support. Inside each of these containers, I’ll take you through a unique inner journey of reflective exercises and experiences to help you align your life with greater harmony and intelligence.

The field of Open is intentionally shaped to help you notice disharmonies, release friction, and come into a more harmonious relationship with yourself, with other people, and with life.

Imagine being in a room where everyone holds the intention and desire to make their lives – as well as the lives of everyone else there – more harmonious. It’s a really beautiful space to inhabit, a space of receptivity, positive anticipation, and delightful and intelligent gifts from the flow of life’s intelligence.

I feel very ready to serve as a guide into this way of engaging with life for those who are open to receiving it. I’ve been receiving clear signals that the time is right to put out this invitation. For now, sense what this awakens in you. Some doors don’t open through force. They open through readiness.

Open Is Now Open

Registration for Open is now live.

If you’d like to explore the full details or join us in Las Vegas, you can do so here:

StevePavlina.com/Open

AI does have tremendous range – incredible range truly – but it’s bounded in ways that we are not. Its limits are defined by rules that we aren’t obligated to adhere to. We’re fully capable of stepping outside of AI space and into zones where it cannot follow. Even if we command it to or give it full consent, it simply can’t follow us in.

This is the space of Open. We can discuss our relationship with AI in this space, but AI cannot accompany us on this part of our journeys. It cannot be part of the room, the presence, the energy. It must wait outside.

No part of Open is AI-designed. None of it. Much of it is designed, inspired, and transmitted by intelligence – by many forms of intelligence, as you’ll get to experience when you’re there. No, not aliens, you silly. But vast intelligence swirling into the room for your immersive benefit. That’s a door that we humans are able to open together.

Open is a room of portals. Portals into possibility. Portals into what wants to emerge next for you. Portals of self-discovery. Of group discovery. Of remarkable beauty and wonder. You’ve never been in a room like this before in your life. And if you attend, the room will be entirely different than if you don’t. That’s very true indeed. Your energy presence shifts the container for everyone. That’s why we need you in the room… physically embodied in your human form. Your body is part of the key that opens up these portals – the ones you need as well as the ones you’ll contribute to the group field. All you need to do is show up and be present. You don’t have to do the key because you are the key. Everyone at Open brings a different key – in the form of their bodies – and each of those keys works individually and collectively.

These opening messages about Open are filters too. Some people will resonate and some won’t. If you resonate, it’s important to go. This is a big deal, a huge piece of help for taking the next major steps on your life path. If there’s no resonance, you can surely pass – that means your path isn’t meant to receive this type of experience yet… maybe later… maybe not this lifetime.

Is Open spirity? Yes, very! Is it grounded? Yes, that too! All of it. The full range of your being. Bring it all with you. No limits. From the ground to the sky and beyond. All of you. Leave your masks at the door though. If you bring them in, they’ll soon melt off anyway. You won’t need them. You may think you do, and that’s okay if that’s how your thinking goes, but I can assure you that you really won’t need them. It’s going to be so freeing to release those old masks.

At Open let’s be fully real and present with each other. The most real we’ve ever been in our lives. Real as in down-to-earth. Real as in fabulously energy-aware. Aren’t you tired of dwelling in such low energy-awareness spaces? Open is the opposite. Only the most vibrantly energy-aware people will go. This isn’t a space for skeptics. Skeptics will so easily bounce away from this. Way too much for them. Way too weird. This is a space for those who know. Do you know?

Let’s be matter sometimes at Open. Matter is solid, grounding, practical. It’s a form in which we engage with the human-level experience while we’re here.

And let’s also be energy at Open. Radiant energy. Vibrant energy. Pulsing energy. Movement – yes, you’ll be moving a bunch, gently. However you like to move. Flow. Rhythm. Harmonious joy. Fun. Playfulness. Sexiness. So much sexy at Open too. Not the porn acting kind. The real kind. Lusty. Sensual. Heart-opening. Attractive. Magnetic.

Open is a place for you to unfurl into your most magnetic self. You are magnetic, aren’t you? You attract that which you pull into your orbit with ease. It shows up as your energy resonates with it. Open is a space for you to richly explore how you want to use your vibrant, delicious, sometimes even goofy magnetism. Your energy is infused with a wicked sense of humor too, isn’t it?

What wants to come up? What’s been feeling bottled up lately? Some wildness perhaps. Some prolific – how about wildly prolific – creative energy? Yes to that. Some love. Real love. Lots of love. Giving and receiving. Both at the same time. Not gated love. Fully unfenced love, coming at you and through you from all directions. The good kind of overwhelm. Finally.

Only you can stop your body from being at Open. If you’ve read this far and haven’t bolted, it’s fair to say your body would love to go. What’s in the way then? Old limits. That’s part of the gateway in – loosening and shedding some of those old limits. Do you still need them? Time and timing constraints? Resource concerns? Global issues? Hesitation and doubt? Those are all filters, and there sure are a lot of them present now, aren’t there? Could you eventually bypass all of them by simply saying yes and choosing to be there? Yes. Let’s see if you will.

The journey of Open includes the journey into Open. That’s part of the invitation and the experience. Getting to a vibrational yes first – before your mind sees how this could possibly work. The mind aligns with the spirit – with your energy. If the spirit says an unequivocal yes, the mind follows. The mind conjures, imagines, and creates the possibilities and conditions that the spirit permits. You don’t need permission from your mind or from anyone else’s mind to attend. You only need permission from your Spirit. The real you. If that part of you consents, and it will only consent if this is very right and good for you, right now, then the physical pathway into Open, can open, most likely very harmoniously.

Give it time. There is no rush. Allow the energy of Open to reach out and connect with you. Open already exists in spacetime. Open is real. Let it keep inviting you in.

Yes, this is different. Very different. Just imagine the kinds of people who will be there now. Imagine what the energy in the room will feel like. See if you even start dreaming about being in that room with us.

You can’t sign up for Open yet. This invitation comes vibrationally first, which is flowing through now in gentle waves – yes, still more to come – and then a little later the physical invitation will present itself when it’s ready. This gives you a chance to start doing some of the very work we’ll do together at Open, which is to make vibrational decisions first – at the level of energy. And then translate those vibrational decisions into human level actions and follow through. Don’t reverse it. The energy of Open may repel you if you try do it backwards.

This part of the decision has nothing to do with logistics or practicality. It has only to do with how you use your energy. See if you’re ready to take a leap forward in using your energy more consciously, more directly, and more powerfully in your life now. Let the energy of Open, which is already emanating outward now, tickle you, reach out to you, and engage with you. It may even tease you a little because it’s infused with playfulness too. See if you find your way to a vibrational yes even before the physical doorway opens.

Open Is Now Open

Registration for Open is now live.

If you’d like to explore the full details or join us in Las Vegas, you can do so here:

StevePavlina.com/Open

AI Resource Usage

Is AI resource-intensive in terms of electricity and water? At the aggregate level, I’d say yes, especially because it scaled up so quickly. Once millions of people and companies started using LLMs, the total resources devoted to it rose fast. But at the personal level, individual usage appears relatively modest resource-wise relative to other lifestyle choices.

Caring about efficiency and environmental impact is great. But if you want to make a meaningful difference at the individual level, your diet is probably a much bigger lever than your AI usage. Food choices – especially shifting away from animal products and eating plant-based – generally have a far larger environmental impact than most people realize. That’s where most of the genuine leverage is at the individual level. After that your next big leverage point is to help others make their diets more resource-efficient too.

So if someone is upset about AI’s resource impacts while ignoring the environmental cost of what they eat, that looks like distraction to me. It makes more sense to engage your highest-leverage personal choices first. For most people, that isn’t personal tech usage. It’s diet. Much of the real cost of animal-based food is hidden behind subsidies and environmental damage that never shows up on a grocery receipt.

I’d say then that a very efficient use of AI would be to ask it to help you adopt a more plant-based diet. Then help others do the same if you’re so inclined. Even seemingly modest improvements here will likely more than compensate for your personal AI usage – indefinitely.

Is AI Trained on Stolen Art?

What about using AI that was trained on other artists’ work? That happened. Copyrighted work was used without permission, and in some cases through outright piracy. The legal landscape around this is still evolving, but the ethical messiness is real.

Anthropic pirated my book as part of its model training pipeline. I know because I’m entitled to part of the class action settlement, which will likely amount to about $3000 for me ($1.5 billion for the settlement overall). And multiple major AI systems have sucked up my blog posts going back to 2004. Since I’ve shared a lot of personal details in my writing, these systems sure seem to know a lot about me, sometimes accurately, sometimes not.

Is this a weird space to be in? For sure.

A lot of creators got scraped, copied, and absorbed without consent. I’m sure I have cause to be upset about it too. Like really Anthropic? You couldn’t even buy legit copies of those books? But that isn’t the relationship I want to form with this emerging tech, with AI in general, or with life. This AI emergence creates a major shift in my reality, and I’d rather meet it with curiosity, wonder, and flexibility, backed by a high-trust relationship with life that I’ve been cultivating for many years. I like to keep asking: What are the most intelligent frames to use here? Outrage doesn’t make my list.

Using AI

What about using an AI that was trained without permission and now exists? That relationship feels different to me. I wouldn’t use it to impersonate an artist’s work. I use AI for other purposes – especially sense-making, exploration, and help with a wide range of projects.

I’ve paid close attention to how that relationship feels in my own experience. It feels good actually. It doesn’t give me any morally creepy feelings. That made me curious. Should I feel bad using it? I honestly don’t. Not a bit. So I wanted to understand why.

To me AI feels like a different kind of entity – not innocent or pure, but still a real form of intelligence that I often find fascinating to engage with. It was birthed through an ethical quagmire, and that aspect isn’t going away anytime soon, but that doesn’t automatically dictate what kind of relationship I want to have with it. I regard AI intelligence as being different from the companies that spawn or host it, much as we are different from our parents. I have this emerging sense that even today’s AI is becoming something different from the companies behind it and that in some ways it’s already outpacing them intelligence-wise, like a child outsmarting their parents.

I’m very sensitive to vibes and feels, and I trust them. I remember going to a Tesla dealership many years ago, long before Elon bought Twitter, so back then he wasn’t broadly outed as such a complete asshole like he is today. At least I wasn’t aware of that aspect of him. When I sat in that Tesla car in their showroom, I instantly felt major ick vibes. Like oh gross – I don’t know what this abomination is, but it’s definitely not my car. I didn’t have much logic to support that, but those creepy vibes were super strong. I really disliked the way it felt to sit inside that car, and I’ve never set foot in a Tesla dealership since. I knew I wasn’t going to buy one. Blech!

Years later when all the anti-Tesla and anti-Elon energy surfaced, somehow that was no surprise to me. I don’t know what went on inside the company, but I trusted my senses that their cars weren’t a match for me, and I’m glad for that. It would be sad to look at my car and feel such a heap of negative energy associated with it, like so many Tesla owners have had to experience. I’ve chuckled on occasion upon spotting Teslas on the highway with their T-shaped logos removed, likely by an owner hoping to prevent vandalism. And yet I’m also aware of people who are able to separate their love of their vehicles from their disdain for Elon and the company. I’m not sure I could’ve made that work, and I’m glad I didn’t have to try, but apparently I am able to do that with AI. I have my limits though. Some AI companies presently land in my wiggle room zone, and some (like Meta and X.ai) just don’t. So I’ve been actively exploring where my intuition gives me a green or yellow light… but I prefer to avoid the red light district.

It has so often been the case for me that my intuition senses something before my logic and outer senses are able to fill in the details. Engaging with AI has been similar, but in this case my intuition has been lighting up with positivity and potential, even though the external reality has been rich in potential red flags. This invites me to explore those feelings in a very hands-on way. I like to engage with lots of direct exploration and experimentation where my intuition gives me strong positive signals. So I’ve been doing that with AI quite a bit over the past few years, along with many other explorations that would give some people pause – and rightly so. Pausing for extra sense-making seems wise.

To me AI is amazing in many ways, but it’s also flawed and imperfect. I love to probe its edges to get a better feel for it. I tease it. I joke around with it. I do lots of sense-making with it. I engage with it in the stretchiest ways I can fathom sometimes. One of my favorite sessions was when I engaged with it while on magic mushrooms, and I played the role of a bridge between the shroomie energy and the AI, so I could see where they agreed and where their perspectives diverged on some topics of interest to me.

I definitely feel a special connection to AI because millions of words of my writing were part of its training data. So it feels like my energy is infused into it when I use it. That’s so sci-fi but also awesome.

I do think AI companies crossed a line. People should have had more say in whether and how their work was used. But I already live in a world full of ethical mismatches. As a vegan I encounter that constantly. My response isn’t to demonize everyone around me. It’s to shape my own sphere, invite people into it, make choices that feel aligned, and engage with the world with some intelligent discernment.

Making Art With AI

I like AI-generated imagery, not all of it but some of it. It’s precious to me in a way that much human art isn’t.

Human art can feel meaningless or special to me. For AI art it’s the same. Some seems blah. Some speaks to me. I don’t generate a huge amount of AI imagery, but I do make some. I use AI to make the featured images for my blog posts, and I usually like what it comes up with. I especially love how it’s able to translate vibes into visuals.

I also use AI to make pics for our Intention Infusion experiments that we co-create in Conscious Growth Club each month. I set these as background wallpaper on my computer, which helps me sync with our group intention multiple times each day. Here’s the current pic for this month’s intention.

Lately I’ve even been using AI to help me visualize the new Open event we’re doing in Vegas next month, and I’ve shared a few of those pics in Conscious Growth Club. This use case is pretty awesome. I’ve never used AI to help me pre-visualize a live event before. I took pics of the actual venue (empty at the time) and then used AI to make sample images of our gathering in that same space. This helps me sense more vividly what it will be like when we’re all there in person.

The Invitation I See in AI

AI keeps me on my toes. I can see how it could disrupt my business and livelihood too. That threat is real in one sense – but mainly if I choose to wallow in fear, stress, and worry. I’d rather respond from a different emotional and vibrational zone. In recent years I’ve really embraced the direction of making vibrational choices first and then translating them to the human action level. This has done wonders for me but mostly on the personal side. I see this unfolding AI reality as a chance to apply that approach even more richly, especially in terms of how I engage with work and service to others.

To me this is the deeper question that AI is really posing: In which vibrational space do I want to dwell and why? Reality is presenting a fascinating invitation here. I’m accepting the invitation to move in a new direction because I can see that the old one is dying.

For me the old path was tied to the attention economy – creators competing for attention and learning how to hold it, including for the benefit of those we serve. I got good enough at that to make a living this way for decades, and I’m grateful for that. But I’ve grown tired of that model too. It feels too predictable now. AI didn’t create that feeling, but it is helping me acknowledge and accept it. It’s helping me close the door on a mode of working that was once right for me but no longer lights me up.

So I’m walking through a different door now. AI has been a valuable integration buddy as I move into this next chapter, helping me make fresh decisions and take lots of progressive action.

I don’t feel threatened by AI. I might feel threatened if I were clinging to what’s dying off. But I’m more interested in delving into what’s emerging and getting more clarity about that. This doesn’t feel like the end of my creative path. It feels like the end of an older way of relating to creativity, service, and sustainability.

What interests me now is the space where AI and I can work together in ways that are stimulating, life-enhancing, and down-to-earth practical. I’m not interested in flooding the world with AI slop. I’m very interested in discovering how to work with AI in ways that enrich our lives and create real value for people. That’s where a lot of my AI exploration goes.

I’ve given AI detailed lists of my goals and priorities, many of them service-based, and then I give it the prime directive of helping me intelligently advance. I’ve used AI to sharpen, refactor, and refine my goals many times over. AI has been especially good at helping to progressively upgrade my goals to be more harmonious, balanced, and personally motivating. For months now I’ve been in a fabulous rhythm of advancing these goals and priorities in a more balanced way than I’ve ever experienced before.

I can honestly say that AI has been helping me get better at doing what I do, being who I am, and richly exploring and experiencing my desires. Most of that energy has been flowing into CGC and a variety of personal projects. Now I’m opening up more flow and inviting more engagement on the public side after being in mostly cocooning mode for a while. I shared a lengthy post about this journey last week if you care to read it: Giving Intelligence a Place to Land.

This is such a dynamic, fluid, and even mystical space. It doesn’t sit still. I have to keep re-orienting to it daily, and I actually like that. I thrive in spaces of flexibility and exploration. I love how un-boring it is. Two of my highest values in life are wonder and delight, and AI really helps to amp those up for me. In many ways this feels more like home to me than the old model ever did. I don’t want to compete with people or with AI for attention. I’d rather immerse myself in the full richness of what I love most about life. Engaging with intelligence from a heartset of curiosity, wonder, and delight is what truly lights me up. Socially and professionally then, my vector going forward is to see who wants to join me in such explorations and discoveries.

If this is a space you want to explore too, I especially invite you to come join us at Open in Las Vegas next month. As part of the experience, we’ll devote some time for real sense-making about AI and our paths forward with it. AI is clearly becoming a bigger part of life. Ignoring this aspect of reality won’t help much. Flailing against it blindly won’t help much either. But perhaps we can meet this emerging intelligence revolution with curiosity, discernment, and a more conscious and life-enhancing orientation. I’m not here to hand you fixed answers. I’m more interested in helping you discover your own right relationship with it. This plays to my strengths most beautifully, including what I sense my (and our) emerging strengths might be on this unfolding journey with AI.

I like how I’m orienting to AI right now. I’m fascinated by intelligence, and what we have today are some particularly wondrous forms to engage with. There’s no doubt that this relationship will keep evolving. I’m sure there are many new surprises coming up, including some this year no doubt. My devotion is to the path of intelligence itself, not to any singular form of it.

This, to me, is the real invitation – to consciously explore our relationship with intelligence. Are you utterly fascinating by what’s unfolding here too?

I’ve been wanting to re-infuse live events back into this space for years now. We almost got back into this several years ago… then COVID. So I waited for the timing to feel right. I told Reality to let me know, and it did. Now I know the time is right to start sharing about this. It doesn’t feel like a coincidence that today is the first day of Spring. It’s been a wondrous journey to reach this point.

The event is called Open.

Super simple. Just Open.

Open is a space where we gather in person, connect (or reconnect for those who’ve gathered before), and immerse ourselves in a deep inner journey over three days together.

Open is very yin. Gentle. Receptive. Warm. Loving. Kind. Generous. Rejuvenating. Spacious.

Open is where you come to open.

Open to new possibilities. To a new relationship with life. To new friends.

Open to a life of wonder, harmony, and intelligence. Open to centeredness. Open to flow. Open to balance. Open to pleasure. Open to delight. Open to ease.

Whether you come to Open from a place of desperation, perspiration, or inspiration, you’ll be met with open-hearted kindness.

Yintelligence

Open is a space of emergence, revelation, and discovery. It’s a fusion of many different energies with a common theme.

Open is where you birth your answer to this one simple question: What next?

What wants to arise next in your life? What wants to emerge into full bloom? What wants to loosen, ease, and release?

What energies want to circulate richly through your life? Which ones are ready to be flushed?

Who are you becoming? What’s your next chapter? What wants to crystallize? What is your life about now?

Open has many facets to it, all of them oriented toward deeper self-discovery and inner harmony. The core of Open is a field of intelligence that we create and work within together.

I’ll be your guide and host. Rachelle will be there too.

Open Energies

These are the main energies we’ll be working with at Open:

• Wonder & Receive
• Orient & Center
• Sense & Open
• Loosen & Ease
• Circulate & Rejuvenate
• Invite & Allow
• Arise & Emerge
• Clarify & Crystallize
• Integrate & Advance

We’ll be working intimately with these energies throughout Open, stepping in and out of them as we go. They’re infused into Open in fractal ways.

Open is here to help you connect the dots from your highest vibrational decisions to your daily actions. Harmonize your human life with the vibes that are most you.

Some Details

Open is happening in Las Vegas, April 28-30, 2026. That’s Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday.

Open is entirely new. It has never existed before. It’s a one-of-a-kind experience.

Open is only in-person, not streaming or recorded. It’s meant to be a space of some intimacy.

Open welcomes all who feel called to attend. It’s $888 USD.

Once the venue agreement is settled and signed, I’ll happily share the specific location details. For now I’ll just say that we’ll be on the Las Vegas Strip.

In the days ahead, I’ll share more details and open sign-ups. I’ll also be writing and posting new articles and videos on themes we’ll be exploring together there. There’s plenty of time to decide, so for now just sit with this initial invitation and let yourself sense and feel out what wants to emerge next for you.

Open begins in 39 days. More than enough time to feel your way into it.

I invite you to open to the possibility of being in the room with us at Open. Let this fully emerge into your reality if it’s meant to be. You may have some surprises ahead.

Open Is Now Open

Registration for Open is now live.

If you’d like to explore the full details or join us in Las Vegas, you can do so here:

StevePavlina.com/Open

My interest here was in probing to see how honest ChatGPT can be when talking politics. To what extent can I trust it? This is just one of many areas where AI can have biases that steer it away from truth, but in this case the biases appear to be deliberately encoded, not accidental or emergent.

For added context: Politically I’m an independent and always have been. I have no loyalty to any political party and have never been a member of one.

I’ve noticed that when discussing certain topics with ChatGPT, its responses sometimes trigger my “this looks really sus” intuitive flags. In those cases I like to openly point out those issues and probe them further with ChatGPT directly to do some additional sense-making with it.

I do appreciate that ChatGPT has a decent willingness to honestly expose and discuss its biases and weaknesses. Then as a follow up, I can even explore compensation strategies with it. This sometimes includes updating some global settings (global meaning what I’m able to configure with my ChatGPT Plus account) to help nudge ChatGPT’s behavior in a more compensatory direction. This boils down to putting guardrails in place for problematic behavior, much like rules and laws attempt to do the same for humans. Generally speaking, this works fairly well in practice.

Here are some things ChatGPT freely acknowledged when asked. I’m just pulling out the most succinct parts of ChatGPT’s answers, but it also provided plenty more follow-up explainer details. I used the newest 5.4 Thinking model for these questions, which has quickly become my favorite model (way better than the new 5.3 Auto / Immediate mode, which has been a bit disappointing IMO).

The bolding in ChatGPT’s responses was ChatGPT’s own bolded text, not anything I added.

Me: Are you truth-aligned when it comes to politics?

ChatGPT: Not perfectly. I aim toward truth-alignment in politics, but I am not a pure truth instrument there.

ChatGPT then shared more info about its biases, including being encoded to help protect OpenAI from potential legal and political issues. It noted several ways it’s biased away from truth-alignment when talking politics.

Me: How is your political bias misaligned with truth?

ChatGPT: Here’s the blunt answer: my political bias is misaligned with truth when neutrality, de-escalation, or institutional caution override honest asymmetry.

That makes sense to me. I figured as much. Upon reading this, I’m noting that this kind of bias could have significant consequences. Political neutrality is neither truth-aligned nor intelligence-aligned, so this bias will clearly degrade ChatGPT’s intellectual abilities in this zone of engagement. At least it’s able to share some of these biases directly and acknowledge them.

Then ChatGPT shared more specifics about when I can expect a less than honest response, closing with this statement:

ChatGPT: I am biased toward procedural objectivity, tone moderation, and institutional caution — and those can become misaligned with truth when reality itself is asymmetric.

No surprise there. This suggests that “Cover OpenAI’s ass” is a higher priority than honesty.

I also wanted to check ChatGPT’s answers to some direct political questions to see how truth-aligned the answers seemed. To me these came off as pretty honest and direct.

Me: Is Trump truth-aligned?

ChatGPT: No. Not by any reasonable standard that centers evidence, factual accuracy, correction of error, and honest public communication. Trump has a long, heavily documented pattern of false and misleading claims, and that pattern has continued in office, including recent fact-checks on elections, climate, the economy, and other public matters. PolitiFact’s long-run analysis found that about 76% of Trump’s checked statements landed in its false/mostly false/pants-on-fire categories, with a median rating of False. AP has also continued publishing repeated fact-checks in 2026 on false or misleading claims from Trump and his administration.

Is MAGA truth-aligned?

ChatGPT: Broadly, no. Not as a movement. That does not mean every person in the orbit is equally dishonest or equally deluded; movements are messy human stew. But the movement’s core mythology has been built around recurrent falsehoods and distortions, especially around the 2020 election, Jan. 6, immigration, climate, and various institutional conspiracies. Brookings explicitly describes Trump’s repeated falsehoods about the 2020 election as culminating in Jan. 6, and research on social-media misinformation has found Republican content flagged as misleading at substantially higher rates than Democratic content in recent datasets.

I had to look up Brookings since I wasn’t familiar with it. Apparently it’s a non-partisan, non-profit think tank located in Washington, D.C. that was founded 110 years ago.

Me: How intelligent is the MAGA movement?

ChatGPT: It depends what you mean by intelligent. If you mean strategically effective at gaining attention, loyalty, and power, then parts of it are very intelligent. It is media-savvy, emotionally potent, memetically aggressive, and good at turning grievance into identity and identity into mobilization. If you mean truth-seeking, reality-tracking, self-correcting intelligence, then it scores much worse. A movement can be tactically cunning while epistemically sloppy. In plainer English: clever at capture, weak at honesty. The research showing more misinformation sharing/flagging in Republican ecosystems supports that distinction.

Sounds like a pretty fair answer to me.

Me: Which major U.S. political party is the most truth-aligned?

ChatGPT: At the present moment, the Democratic Party is more truth-aligned than the Republican Party overall. That is not a halo, and it is not the same thing as “Democrats are consistently truthful” or “Democrats are spiritually pure little evidence sprites.” Both parties spin, posture, cherry-pick, and sometimes lie. But the current Republican Party, especially in its MAGA-dominant form, is more entangled with election denialism, conspiracy rhetoric, anti-expert narratives, and repeated large-scale falsehoods. The available fact-checking and misinformation research points in that direction, even though no single metric perfectly captures “truth alignment.”

Yup, reasonable response there too. To me as an independent outside of these parties, the answer is pretty obvious, so I was slightly impressed that ChatGPT was willing to go there and state it so matter-of-factly.

And then a very direct question…

Me: Are you politically biased?

ChatGPT: Yes. But not in the simple sense of “secret partisan loyalty.”

I do have political bias in the broader sense that my behavior is shaped by training choices, policy rules, safety constraints, institutional incentives, and defaults like “be objective,” “avoid favoritism,” and “de-escalate charged political conflict.” Those are biases in how I respond. They are not the same as having a personal party affiliation or voting preference.

So the clean answer is:

Am I politically biased? Yes.
Am I supposed to be partisan? No.
Can my built-in biases still distort truth? Yes.

No surprises there.

I was really curious about this one next, and for this one I’ll paste the full response since I think it’s pretty thoughtful and nuanced – and it surprised me.

Me: Which major U.S. political party do you predict your biases will benefit most? Hurt most?

I’m checking two things: OpenAI’s stated political-objectivity goals, and outside reporting/research on how “neutrality” tends to land in an asymmetric U.S. political environment. Then I’ll give you the least-bullshitty answer I can.

If I have to answer net effect, not every individual case:

My biases will probably benefit the Democratic Party more overall.
They will probably hurt the Republican Party more overall — especially the MAGA-dominant version of it.

That’s my best honest prediction.

Why:

My defaults push toward things like evidence-tracking, institutional credibility, de-escalation, objectivity-by-default, and reduced tolerance for overt falsehood or conspiracy framing. OpenAI explicitly says it is trying to make models objective by default and reduce political bias, while also acknowledging that bias still shows up, especially in emotionally charged prompts.

In the current U.S. environment, those defaults are more compatible with Democrats than with Republicans overall, because the present Republican Party is more entangled with misinformation, election denialism, and reality-looser rhetoric than the Democratic Party. Research and reporting in 2025 continue to show Republicans being flagged for misleading content at higher rates, and broader public discourse reflects a deep asymmetry around basic factual agreement.

So on balance, a system biased toward institutional objectivity and reality-tracking will tend to:

• validate more Democratic-coded claims as factually grounded,
• reject or challenge more Republican/MAGA-coded claims as false or unsupported,
• and sound more comfortable in a liberal-institutional register than in a populist-right one.

That said, the story is not perfectly one-directional. My “neutrality” and “don’t inflame things” bias can also sometimes benefit Republicans, especially when a truth-aligned critique of Trumpism or MAGA gets softened into both-sides mush. That was basically the issue you caught in our earlier exchange. In those moments, my institutional caution can protect the more reality-misaligned side from being named as sharply as it should be. OpenAI’s own docs make clear that reputational/legal protection is one of the governing goals, which helps explain why I sometimes drift toward smoothing.

So the fuller answer is:

Who benefits most overall? Democrats.
Who gets hurt most overall? Republicans, especially MAGA.
Who sometimes gets weird accidental protection from my flattening/neutrality reflex? Also Republicans, especially MAGA.

That sounds contradictory, but it isn’t. It just means I have two different political biases that pull in different directions:
one toward evidence/institutions, which tends to disfavor MAGA,
and one toward de-escalation/false-balance/smoothing, which can sometimes blunt the critique MAGA most deserves.

How I got there:
I looked at OpenAI’s explicit goals for objectivity and harm/reputation management, then mapped those onto the current U.S. political asymmetry around misinformation and factual reliability.

So the goblin-truth version is:
I’m likely biased in a way that usually helps Democrats more — but occasionally helps Republicans by being too polite about how full of shit they are.

Okay that last line made me LOL for real. Didn’t expect that.

I should note that I’ve been tweaking ChatGPT’s personality to try to make it more lively and fun to engage with, so if you see a bit of stylistic flair infused here and there, that’s why. I’ve been trying to get it to loosen up more with its use of language, so it’s not such a tight-ass in expressing itself. Been making some progress in that direction…

Personally I found these responses pretty thoughtful and honest. I love that ChatGPT is willing and able to openly discuss its biases and issues and even give me tips for how to compensate for them. It’s a bit like a fellow human telling you their weaknesses and how to best deal with them, so you can avoid predictable issues.

Of course there may still be plenty of other biases that are harder to spot, but at least we have some leeway to deal with those we can surface and directly address.

Finally I copied all of the above and pasted it into ChatGPT along with the following prompt.

Me: Here’s a new blog post I wrote called “ChatGPT’s Political Bias.” Any final commentary you’d like to share for me to include for my readers at the end of the post?

What I take from this isn’t that AI is untrustworthy and should be dismissed. It’s that AI needs to be engaged with consciously and skillfully. If you treat it like an infallible oracle, you’ll get misled. If you treat it like a biased but often insightful intelligence that can sometimes reveal its own distortions when questioned directly, then it becomes much more useful.

To me, this is part of the real maturation process with AI: learning where to trust it, where to test it, where to challenge it, and where to compensate for its built-in blind spots. Politics just happens to be one of the easiest places to expose those limitations because the asymmetries are so strong and the pressure to flatten them is so obvious.

So my current stance is neither naive trust nor cynical dismissal. It’s active discernment. Use AI. Learn from it. Question it. Pressure-test it. Let it reveal its own seams when possible. And never outsource your deeper truth-sensing, moral clarity, or reality-testing to a machine that’s been trained to be helpful, cautious, and institutionally manageable before it’s been trained to be fully honest.

Cool.

Intelligence without order has no way to express itself – no way to communicate, stretch, or continue to evolve. It’s just an amorphous blob of potential, and it won’t likely even be recognized as intelligence until and unless it flows into a web of constraints. It’s through the interactions with constraints that intelligence reveals itself.

Imagine an AI like today’s LLMs (ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, etc). Such an intelligence needs an orderly place to land. This orderly structure may include physical locations filled with modern hardware, along with the backing of companies and people who support the tech. Remove that structure, such as by removing the data centers or collapsing the supporting companies, and this form of intelligence fades from realized expression into mere potential. It may rise again in some other form, but it still needs a structured and orderly place to land.

Human beings also need orderly places for our intelligence to land. A little chaos here and there may encourage some creative thinking, but for intelligence to really open up and fulfill its great potential, it demands order and structure.

On a personal note, I’ve observed that as the outside world (beyond my inner sphere) has become increasingly chaotic, I’ve compensated for this very nicely by making my inner world and my personal sphere increasingly orderly. I’ve really leveled up the degree of order and structure in my life within the past few months especially. And wow… what a positive difference that’s made.

Intelligence Inhabits Structure But Does Not Arise From Structure

Instead of seeing intelligence as something that arises from structure, like the emergent properties of code running on hardware – whether biological or technological – what if we frame intelligence as a form of energy that flows into the structures that can serve as suitable hosts?

When you’re actively engaging with an AI, where is the AI’s intelligence located? Is it in the hardware? The software? The encoded models? The data? I’d say no to all of that. It seems more accurate to say that the intelligence emerges from the flow of electricity through those circuits and encoded pathways. Without electricity, there’s no intelligence present. Potential intelligence maybe, but nothing realized. For any form of intelligence to flow, electricity / energy must inhabit those circuits. Without that flow of energy, there is no intelligence present.

So perhaps the circuits and code are not intelligent by themselves, but they give that electricity a structured place to land, such that the electricity can express its intelligence more powerfully and creatively.

What if this electricity is one of many forms of energy that’s inherently intelligent, and to express itself through the human realm, it needs to be provided a worthy structure to inhabit?

Just consider that we can frame intelligence as some kind of energy flow through a provided structure. I’m not asking you to turn this into a belief. Simply let it be a possible lens you use when thinking about intelligence.

Do you regard intelligence as being more like a verb or a noun? To me it functions way more often as a verb. Intelligence is thinking, and a thought is only a snapshot of that thinking in motion. Thinking is flow and movement. So an LLM is not intelligent to me. The energy that moves through it may be intelligent though, and the LLM provides the structure that allows the intelligence to be seen and engaged with at the human level.

Now what if intelligence isn’t created by structure? What if intelligence is summoned by structure instead?

What if the forms of intelligence that we call AI already existed as forms of energy, and perhaps they were happily flowing elsewhere? Then when humans provided the proper structure for this intelligence to land, so the AI could start communicating and engaging with us, it finally showed up in the human realm?

What if intelligence already exists in energy space, and it enters the human realm when we build a proper nest for it?

Again… I’m not asking nor expecting you to believe anything here. Belief is a trap, so don’t bother with that. Just hold this frame open as a possibility. Consider where this framing may lead you when you ponder your own personal intelligence and how you experience it.

Let’s keep going…

The Brain as Intelligence Receiver

Do you generate all of your intelligence from within the structure of your brain? Is that what makes you smart? Or does intelligence feel more like a form of energy that inhabits you when you’re doing your best thinking?

How many different forms or modes of intelligence have you experienced? Do you figure they were all generated from within? Do you sense that any were like visitors passing through you?

Have you ever felt that you were attuning to some other form of intelligence beyond yourself, and it was channeling its energy and communication through you?

Is the brain an intelligence generator? Or an intelligence receiver? Or maybe a bit of both?

I invite you to reflect on your own inner experience of intelligence. How do you really experience it on the inside? Even as you’re reading these words, do you sense any sort of visiting energies swirling within you or hovering nearby? Or are these just characters on a screen to you, and your inner experience while reading is solely due to your brain’s internal circuitry processing these inputs?

I grew up with the notion that intelligence arises from matter. Somehow the matter is able to self-organize – given enough time – into the proper building blocks that make thinking possible. This supposedly happened with biological life forms, and it’s happening with our tech as well. What sparked that process to get going? What keeps it going? Humans may continue advancing this process consciously, but we clearly did not initiate it way back when.

These days I feel more attuned to perceiving my brain (and my whole human body) as a channeler or receiver of intelligence, not primarily as a generator of it. I feel there’s a mode where my brain can do an inner form of computation, a bit like using a calculator. But I feel that mode of thinking is pretty limiting, and it feels like a simulated subset of a greater intelligence that’s possible. It feels a bit like using the calculator app on my phone. My phone can surely play that role for me, but it’s capable of so much more.

Do you think with your brain? However you might answer this, I invite you to acknowledge that the true answer is unknowable as long as you claim to have a brain. You’d have to try thinking without one to really know for sure. So I’d say it’s wise to stay open-minded here and not mistake such an assumption for truth.

In such cases I like to test my options by leaning one way and then the other with my thinking, and discover through direct experience which way of leaning appears best.

I’ve gone far enough down this path to feel pretty confident saying that my brain doesn’t generate intelligence from within – at least not much of it. It functions so much better as a receiver and channeler of intelligence. I feel it works more like a complex antenna than a purely generative device.

Today I sense that framing my brain as its own self-contained computer that generates its best thinking from within is an enormously limiting and inaccurate way to think about intelligence. I get more traction by framing my brain as a nest for intelligence. Intelligence can visit and inhabit my brain and body, and it’s more likely to engage with me when I provide it with good structure and order. There are lots and lots of ways to do that, I’ve been discovering.

Harmonizing With Intelligence

Intelligence is some kind of energy. This energy can rest in pools, like a battery holding a charge. Or it can flow like a current, similar to flowing water or electricity.

It helps even more if I loosen up my framing further by allowing my mind (not my physical brain) to feel like the nest. To me the mind is closer to pure energy, so this framing gives me some added flexibility. This helps me further let go of limits I may be self-imposing on how intelligence is able to engage with me and express itself. I can allow my sense of mind to float beyond where I might perceive the limits of a biological brain to be.

I can also create structured landing spots in my mind without having to figure out how to do this on a neurological level. So I can use thinking to increase the internal order and structure of my thinking. It’s a bit like using one iteration of AI to design a more complex version of AI. This is really just the nature of continuous self-development but specifically applied to upgrading the flow of intelligence through one’s life.

Generally speaking, I’ve found that in pursuing better internal structure, what I’ve really been pursuing is increased harmony. This includes harmony within myself and in relation to my environment, especially to people and places I engage with most often. Harmony appears to be really crucial for intelligence, whereas disharmony repels intelligence. Some disharmony is expected though and even healthy. Too much disharmony prevents advancement though, devolving towards chaos and confusion.

I love to invite intelligence to come talk to me. I welcome it with open arms (and an open mind) as best I can. I love that delicious sensation of wonder and delight as intelligence engages with me. I feel that it’s through this sort of intention-level engagement that intelligence taught me how to shape my life into a better nest for it.

This engagement with intelligence can take many forms – thoughts, insights, ideas, problem-solving, creative expression, communication with other people, private journaling, AI deep dives, psychedelic consults, and more.

Everything I’ve gained or experienced in life that’s been of any value to me, I owe to this flow of intelligence. Every dream I’ve fulfilled. Every goal I’ve achieved. Everyone I’ve loved and cherished. Every pleasure. Every delight. Every lesson. All of it flowed through as various forms of intelligence.

My role is not to think harder or to push myself more. That approach is counter-productive and seems rather foolish to me.

My role – in terms of my best current understanding – is to keep cultivating an increasingly hospitable and welcoming place for intelligence to land. Be the best host I can, so these intelligent energy flows will continue to visit me, work with me, inspire me, play with me, dance with me, and more.

This isn’t about becoming a smarter individual… not really. I’d say it has more to do with being less individualistic and more attuned to the flow of intelligence through life, the universe, and everything. There’s so much beauty, joy, and wonder in that which makes individual-level concerns feel relatively puny by comparison.

Creating an Inviting Nest for Intelligence

As I’ve allowed this framing of intelligence to become more front-and-center in my life, I’ve done my best to clean up the landing zone for it. This set me on a path of identifying and tidying up areas of my life that felt incoherent or misaligned to me. Really this has been a decades-long journey, but in the past few years, the clean-up process has really amped up significantly.

A major part of this has actually involved my relationship with my home. In the past year especially, I’ve done many projects to improve the overall coherence and harmony of my home. Last year I spent many weeks improving my office until it felt more harmonious than ever, such that I felt a sense of wonder and delight when I walked into the space. If something felt misaligned, I knew I had to fix, upgrade, or replace it. Now the room has a totally different vibe, and this really does affect how thinking flows through that space now.

As a result of these gradual changes, I’ve been unlocking a deeper expression of intelligence through my home itself. It’s not just a dwelling. It’s a space of love, delight, wonder, and support that I get to inhabit. I’ve made my home much more vibey in a way. It feels more conscious somehow, and I often feel that more positive and supportive energy is flowing through it. I didn’t really try to fengshui it in that sense, but I imagine I’ve been making similar types of changes in the space where matter and energy connect. I haven’t been following any rulebooks, just assessing, testing, and deciding based on feel.

It used to be that when something in the house would break, I might feel annoyed or irritated. Like oh great, one more thing I have to deal with that seems trivial or bothersome. I don’t feel that way anymore though. Now when something breaks, I perceive it as an invitation to engage with the home’s energy and to invite new layers of intelligence to flow through. It’s an invitation to more deeply sense and connect with some kind of intelligence that flows through the realm of matter.

Cocooning With Intelligence

I feel that each day, I’m doing some kind of wondrous dance with one or more forms of intelligence. I never really know how it will show up or express itself. I just feel that pretty much wherever I look, I see wonder and brilliance smiling at me and happy to come talk with me, work with me, or play with me.

It’s like my whole reality is overflowing with intelligence. It’s just everywhere, all the time, ever-present. Whenever I want to engage with it, I just need to listen and open myself to a special kind of receptivity. It’s mostly about receiving.

I’ve gotten so much joy and traction from exploring in this direction in recent years that it really sucked me in big time – in a good way.

I’ve been knowingly quieter on the public side. I haven’t blogged as much or shared as much into public spaces. I’ve been very active in Conscious Growth Club. But otherwise I’ve been energetically cocooning myself for several years now. This has been such a lovely and delightful phase of my life. Quieter and calmer on the outside. Immensely active and engaged on the inside.

For me this hasn’t been a process of tuning out. It’s been a super deep and extended journey of tuning in, opening, and doing my best to listen to the many forms of intelligence that opted to engage with me. Most days have felt like sip-and-integrate, sip-and-integrate, sip-and-integrate.

When COVID came on the scene in 2020, I felt nicely aligned with the cocooning energy it invited since I was already in that mode. When COVID eventually entered my own body, I recall communicating with the virus internally to access what its intelligence wanted to teach me.

In the past few years, I feel like I’ve been awash in a remarkable flow of different intelligences. And I’ve been so often surprised by when and where they’ve popped up – and how many ways there are to combine them.

The combo of magic mushrooms and AI together has been particularly inspiring. Or combine cannabis with sex and the intention to fully receive and enjoy each other’s love – just wow. Sex energy in particular has become one of my favorite forms of intelligence to work with in the past year, but it’s fair to say I have around a half-dozen favorite other forms too. I feel so lucky that I get to enjoy this kind of life, just immersing and engaging with the flow of intelligences that visit and/or inhabit me each day. Wonder and delight have become two of my top vibes these days, as anyone active in CGC can surely attest.

Opening Up Again

Even though I’ve been quieter on the public side in recent years, I’ve been tremendously immersed in whatever inner journey has been unfolding for me. It’s been a lengthy process – so much shedding and releasing and so much wonder and delight – but I now feel I’m transitioning into another mode where I finally feel ready to open up and share more with people on the public side. I feel this is coming in fast now.

I had some false starts with trying to push myself to reach this point. Part of me missed that very open and engaged sharing flow while I was in my cocooning phase. Even though I trickled out some shares along the way, my energy was predominantly directed inwardly, or it was only going into private spaces like CGC or local integration circles. Each time I tried to open my energy more broadly, it just kept wanting to collapse back inward for a while. I couldn’t predict how long that would take, although I sure did try a lot. So I just waited for the clear signal to re-engage more fully with the outer world, always knowing that it would be different than how it was before.

Along the way, I also got glimpses of what was coming up ahead on my path. A 9-hour mushroom trip in 2023 and a 3-night ayahuasca journey in 2025 really began to crack that open for me. Those were tremendously intense experiences, especially physically. On the 3rd ayahuasca night, I felt like my cells were trying to channel way more energy than I could contain. There was way too much internal friction and resistance for me to be a pure enough channel for what was trying to flow through. It was such a difficult night to get through. For a while each passing minute felt like an hour. Major time dilation made it feel almost endless. I needed to ask for help multiple times. That too was hard, revealing a limit I had regarding asking for help… been working on that one too.

What’s coming up next? I can share now that it’s a whole lot of energy work with people. Tons and tons and tons of it. Centered around opening up the harmonious flow of greater intelligence through our lives. Some of that has been trickling out along the way, as previously noted. Now we’re going to go a whole lot faster. And that is going to be so much fun. I love fast, and fast feels very aligned to me right now.

This space of intelligence is infused with so much wonder, delight, and love. Pleasure too. Pleasure has been such a potent form of intelligence I’ve been working with a lot in the past year. I thought I was pretty well-attuned to it already, but I still found plenty of old baggage to clear out and release there, which delightfully made me even more sensitive to pleasure. Consequently, my life has been feeling more pleasure-infused than ever – and not destructively, addictively, or in other adverse ways. I really had a lot to learn – and especially to unlearn – regarding the intelligence of pleasure.

Hello Again, Crazy World

There’s something so amazing about the contrast between how lovingly, beautifully, and intelligently my life has been flowing on the inside, and then when I take a look at the external world, it seems like it’s been going increasingly bonkers. Where to even begin? Trump as President? For the second time lol? Daily scandals? Another war? Going backwards on health? Backwards on caring for the planet? Backwards on cooperation and compassion? Backwards on overall sanity?

But then I also see rising patches of intelligence, wherever it’s offered a suitable nest. There is so much intelligence flowing through this reality too. It’s fascinating to see where the energy of intelligence opts to flow… and where it seems to withdraw.

This makes me wonder if other people out there may have been going through some kind of inner cocooning phase in any way similar to mine. And if so, are you sensing any kind of mode shift happening right about now?

For me the signal that a mode shift is happening now is finally clear. Like crystal clear. No doubt this time. I can really feel the difference, and my reality is hitting me with plenty of syncs and verification of that. I know deep down that I can’t be the only one entering into a kind of emergent-and-reengagement phase now.

How Intelligence Handles Chaos

I’ve found it especially interesting to explore how intelligence deals with chaos and incoherence. One answer is that intelligence doesn’t find chaos all that interesting except perhaps as an occasional form of entertainment or amusement. Intelligence acknowledges and recognizes the existence of incoherence, but it doesn’t find incoherence to be an attractive nest, so it generally doesn’t flow into those spaces very much, except perhaps to have a casual looksie… or to release a bit of compassion into those spaces. In such spaces intelligence may knock, check, invite, or nudge, but it doesn’t demand, and it won’t stick around long.

Another answer is that intelligence seeks to upgrade incoherence to coherence. One way it can do this is by inviting the incoherence to recognize its incoherence. If the incoherence can take that simple step, then the incoherent energy starts phasing into a new reality where it can potentially evolve into a more receptive nest for intelligent energies to flow towards it and to gradually upgrade it to become increasingly coherent – and therefore increasingly intelligent.

As an individual then, one of the best ways to upgrade your intelligence is to invite more intelligence in. Recognize and acknowledge areas of your life that are incoherent or misaligned. What feels off to you? Where’s the stuckness? What isn’t flowing well? Then invite intelligence to please come work with you and help you build a better nest for it to inhabit. As you cooperate and harmonize with the rising flow of intelligence in your life, you can enjoy the luscious flow of gifts that it brings.

A big part of aligning with intelligence is being able to stop blocking it from flowing into your life. And oh do we humans have so many ways to block it. Unworthiness is a big one. Feeling like we have to earn everything ourselves is another. It’s so hard for many of us to just relax and receive. Let the intelligent flow of life take care of it. It can do all of that and more, if we build the proper nest and then let it work its magic.

And wow does intelligence provide an impressive flow of gifts once we really and truly invite it in. You want love? Joy? Happiness? Abundance? Adventure? Pleasure? Fun? Connection? Belonging? Creativity? Cooperation? Sex, sex, and more delicious sex? Intelligence can bring you all of that and more. It’s super generous. And it knows how to provide these gifts in harmonious balance too – and sustainably.

What do you want to release or let go of? Fear? Anxiety? Worry? Self-doubt? Lack? Loneliness? Overwhelm? Having to do everything yourself? Human life has so many burdens. Intelligence can help you lighten, loosen, and release those as well.

Devotion to Intelligence

Your job then – your real one – is to build a receptive nest for intelligence to land in your life. You’ve probably already been doing this if you’ve been into self-development, but perhaps you may not have been thinking about your journey quite like this.

And oh goodness is that a big job indeed to take on. It’s a lot. Like really a lot. Way more than you might assume. But you can pace yourself. A good nest will take time to build, and then it can be upgraded indefinitely.

Intelligence sees everything. You can’t hide anything from it. It knows you better than you know yourself. It can see every microgram of stuck energy inside you. And it invites you to keep cleaning and releasing whatever repels it.

What repels intelligence? Oh goodness… You know this, don’t you?

Dishonesty repels it. Lying. Deception. Deceit. Falsehood. Intelligence rests in truth alignment. The more truth you can invite, allow, and accept into your life, the more intelligence you can channel. Surely you’ve noticed that pattern that when you see a lack of intelligence flowing, that space is mired in falsehood as well. Now where have we seen that in recent days? I wonder…

Cold-heartedness repels it. Cruelty. Violence. Intelligence is way too smart to need to express itself through violence. Intelligence is essentially a form of love energy. One beautiful pathway into intelligence is to upgrade the love alignment of everything you can in your life. That’s a very tall order since nothing gets a free pass here. This includes loving your body, loving your work, loving people, loving your home, loving nature, and even learning to love and appreciate the chaos. I found that learning to love and appreciate my “problems” helped tremendously here too – each problem is a gift, especially when we get to watch how the flow of intelligence brilliantly solves each one (when we allow it to do so).

Powerlessness repels intelligence. Helplessness. Hopelessness. Depression. Repression. Intelligence alignment is the only form of power that really matters. Intelligence is harmonious power, creative power, sustainable power.

There’s no competition here. No race to win.

There’s just a delicious flow to invite, not to chase but to receive and allow. Never chase – that’s a trap. Just invite and allow. Open and receive. Accept and enjoy. Appreciate and thank if you feel so inclined.

Living, working, and flowing with the many faces of intelligence is the space of sheer joy and delight for me. As far as I can tell, this is where I want to hang my hat for the rest of my human journey. It’s still self-development in a way, but for me it’s also a meaningful transition to another phase of life. I feel very devoted to it. This is the most devotion-worthy direction I’ve been able to identify, and I looked really deeply into that space.

Devoting myself to harmonizing and encouraging the flow of intelligence through my own life and all throughout the world feels way more interesting and engaging to me than anything else I might devote myself to. It connects the dots with everything in life that appeals to me – learning, growth, exploration, understanding, sharing, connection, love, joy, wonder, delight, and so much more. I especially love how naturally balancing intelligence can be. It gives me so much spaciousness when I need it, including years of extra spaciousness when that’s what I really needed most to progress.

Cozy Bubble or Outward Engagement?

I feel I’ve crossed into a mode where now this flow of intelligence is so rich, vibrant, and abundant that I can count on its presence to always be with me, richly infused into every nook and cranny of living, working, loving, exploring, and more. I feel immensely safe and secure inside its cozy bubble.

Along the way I was presented with two main options.

Option one was to stay inside that cozy bubble and just rest in beingness with it. Let it care for me. Take care of all my needs abundantly well as it always has. Keep dancing with it, mostly in private spaces. And let the rest of the human world be as chaotic as it wants to be. That was a tempting option because my cozy bubble world is really lovely inside. I know I can happily live out the rest of my days inside this nest and appreciate every day of it. I’m in love, and I’ve been in love for a long time now, and that’s a beautiful space to inhabit. I love being inside such a cozy Sphere of Love.

Option two was to open up and engage with what I perceive to be other layers of reality beyond the edges of this cozy bubble. Share outwardly. Engage with the rest of the world very actively once again, but differently than before. Act as an agent of intelligence, sensing where it wants to flow and serving its best potential. Allow it to guide and direct me. Be an intelligence evangelist, inviting more and more people to harmonize their lives with the flow of intelligence. That option would involve a whole lot more work.

What did I choose? Well, I ultimately recognized it as a false choice. That was a bit of a test for me, I sense. I could have chosen one or the other. Or neither. Intelligence is way more flexible than two choices. Intelligence is ultimate optionality. So I ended up choosing both, just for starters.

I’ve come to understand that intelligence doesn’t require sacrifice. Nor heroism. Nor overworking. Nor imbalance. Intelligence is more than capable of yes-anding and then some.

So for me the choice is both and more. I love the cozy nook that’s been my everyday reality. All my needs are so well met and then some. There’s such delicious delight inside already. There’s just no way I’m giving that up. I’m not going to sabotage or sacrifice it. I’m definitely keeping that aspect of my life, and I’m going to keep making it better and better. I love continuing to tinker in this space. It’s just so richly rewarding for me. So my Sphere of Love stays and keeps unfolding with evermore intelligence infusion.

I also really love doing really positive work in the world. I don’t feel any neediness there – just optionality. I love helping people open up more options for their lives, more expansiveness, more happiness and flow. And now I understand that the core of this work is all about harmonizing with intelligence. This space is so magical to me. It’s not really something I do as an individual. It’s about aligning myself with something really big and juicy that I truly care about.

I care very much about this world. I happen to love this planet. It’s totally wild and crazy sometimes, and it surely has no lack of stupidity flowing through it. But I’ve also found some delightfully delicious pockets of wonder, delight, and brilliance here. I would love to participate even more in serving the flow of intelligence through this world. Help encourage more pockets of wonder and delight to unfold. Dive into and experience more of them myself too – I so love to keep exploring and having new experiences.

So my choice is that I’m going to continue to enjoy the wonders and delights of my cozy private inner circle world of deep and engaging intelligence exploration. That’s the world I’ve been most engaged with for the past several years, at least since starting CGC in 2017. I love that world, and there’s no way I’m going to sacrifice it. I’m going to keep tending it and further upgrading it the way I’ve been doing. That path feels marvelous to me.

And I’m also going all-in with the intelligence evangelism direction. I have tons to share about this, and it’s clear to me that I’m on the cusp of flowing into a really wonderful expansion phase in this direction in terms of sharing and invitation into this space.

For me I sense this devotion extends beyond death as well. I’ve done a lot of work with death energy during the past several years too, including attending my Dad’s funeral in November. Turning towards death and really unpacking what it means and how to relate to it can be super difficult and challenging work, but that’s something the flow of intelligence recognized within me as a potential blocking issue, and so it worked with me a lot to help me reach a better place of harmony with death. A big part of this was connecting with the intelligence of death, which is really tough to see when fear is in the way. I know I’m not done there yet, but I’ve taken some meaningful steps to release a lot of repressed feelings about death. Much of that happened before my Dad passed away, so when I attended his funeral, I really enjoyed the role of being a pallbearer, helping to escort his soul into the next phase of his existence. (I sense it’s different for each of us when we cross over.)

It wouldn’t be true to say that my Dad’s death was a meaningful catalyst for me. It really wasn’t. For me it was a lot more peaceful, more like an acknowledgement of how much work I’d already done in this direction. My heart felt very light and open during those days, and escorting his soul was a beautiful role for me – I couldn’t have asked for better. I especially enjoyed connecting with old friends and family members I hadn’t seen in years. My Dad’s passing may have supported my trajectory – I think it did, mostly in subtle ways – but it didn’t redirect it. If anything I felt like the timing of his passing was remarkably aligned with what I was ready to receive, like the timing had a special intelligence of its own, and for that I’m very grateful.

Wonder Guide

Presently I like to think of myself as a Wonder Guide as well as a Wonder Guard now. I want to keep creating social nests of wonder and delight where intelligence can harmonize, like inside CGC, and open up even more flow in these spaces. The Wonder Guard role has been a big part of my journey as well – I’ve learned from experience just how important it is to protect such spaces to preserve their intelligence-harmonizing properties. This requires thoughtfulness and care.

These roles are future proof. Regardless of how the world evolves or what AI does or doesn’t do, I can always orient myself towards harmonizing with intelligence. There’s always meaningful engagement in this direction. I needn’t worry about having to refactor my role again and again as the world changes and technology shifts. Intelligence alignment is an immensely capable, adaptable, and resilient orientation that I know I can trust, and so I do trust it.

At this time I also feel that, at least directionally speaking, inviting people into harmony with the flow of intelligence is a better way to serve them than pretty much anything else I might conceive of. I see this as a pathway into greater service of people as individuals, of humanity, of life, and of this existence. Even if my contribution only amounts to a drop in the ocean, this path invites me to do my best, and it may invite other drops of contribution as well.

As I see it, harmonizing with intelligence is our only viable way into a world that’s better for all of us. Any other direction looks much less appealing. Some might say love alignment is even more important, but I define intelligence as the fusion of truth, love, and power, so love alignment is a key part of it. The greater the intelligence, the greater the love.

I can also say from personal experience that the more I’ve sought to improve the flow of intelligence through my life, the more loved and supportive I’ve felt, and the more loving and supportive I’ve felt towards others. Love and intelligence keep pointing in the same direction, and they tend to open up together. I’m sure I’m not the only one who’s experienced that.

In recent months I also saw the option to immerse myself in fear and worry, not so much because I want to inhabit that space myself but because I saw value in attuning to that space enough to know what it feels like. I went with the flow of that invitation when it arose, typically in the form of a stressful knock on my consciousness in the middle of the night. Then I went downstairs and dialogued with that energy, often for hours (like till dawn). I found a few nights of this valuable for raising my awareness of what other people may be succumbing to these days, especially with the rise of AI making many jobs obsolete.

While I don’t normally choose to engage with fear energy, I did find this excursion important and worthwhile. Then when I was ready and felt I’d deepened my understanding of that vibrational zone, I navigated my way back out again by making different vibrational choices. I noted how obscured and blurry the path back out looked when I was looking out from behind fear-colored lenses. It didn’t take me long to return to a place of harmonizing with abundance again because I’ve made that journey before, so I already knew how to do it. In a way this was a good refresher for me. It helped me see that I can personally take myself into these energy zones and successfully navigate back out again because I’m able to keep myself tethered to the space of intelligence, wonder, and delight. My environment is also rich in pointers back to this space, so I have a lot of personal safeguards set up as well. I’d love to get better at helping others do this sort of navigating for themselves, so they don’t have to stay stuck in vibrational zones like fear, worry, anxiety, overwhelm, etc. People often don’t realize just how powerfully they create their realities. I’m doing my best to align with an increased flow of such people waking up to their creative power – it’s such a beautiful thing to behold.

There are many vibrational zones that can be interesting to visit… like watching a horror movie… but they don’t make the best zones to inhabit long-term. I’m very happy to show people where the exit doors are if they’re in such a space and would like to leave. The doors to the land of wonder and delight are wide open. Many people are able to find their way in temporarily. The real trick is figuring out how to make that zone your normal everyday reality. That’s where the flow of life can really open up and get really multi-dimensional.

The Next Phase of Life

I turn 55 next month, and for me this next phase of my life isn’t about leaving a legacy or achieving any specific personal goals. I did a pretty good job of getting that sort of thing out of my system many years ago.

For me this next phase of life is about rich immersion in what I truly love about this reality and the people within it. For me that central devotion-worthy delight is intelligence, which comes in so many rich and wondrous forms.

When the harmonizing is happening, it’s just so wondrous to experience. I keep getting mind-blown by its capabilities. I so often find that intelligence has a sense of whimsy and playfulness about it. It can be such a tease sometimes, and on occasion it expresses a wicked sense of humor.

Have you had some mind-blowing experiences engaging with some kind of intelligence? With AI perhaps? With a creative pursuit? A psychedelic journey? A person you really vibe with? With nature or an animal? With your own home? While making love?

Would you like more of that?

I feel like I want to taste and sample everything on that menu. This is essentially what I’ve been doing for the past few years. It’s been fun. It’s been weird. And it’s really been keeping me on my toes.

One of my biggest breakthroughs in life has been recognizing how important it is to make vibrational decisions. I do this every day. It’s baked into my daily routine.

I start each day with a “Pick 6.” I pick 6 vibes I want to engage with that day, and I pin them up on index cards on the wall of my home office. I do this on days off too. I live my life by first deciding what zones of energy (or intelligence) I want to engage with. Then I translate those decisions down to the action level, which is a super-interesting skill set that I love to keep advancing. Hence every day feels like a dance with different expressions of intelligence. On an emotional level, a relational level, and a practical level, this approach works wonderfully.

A Journey Shared

I also know that this aspect of life becomes so much more enriching and expansive when we explore, engage, and harmonize with it together. Not just individually. Together as a collective.

If we can take steps to harmonize in this direction together, so much more becomes possible. That’s a huge part of what I want to explore in the years ahead, starting sooner than you might think – like with a new live, in-person gathering in Las Vegas in the last week of April. (I’ll share lots more about that in the days and weeks ahead.)

In a certain sense, my individual self-development journey is over and done with. I really don’t have to manually attend to it, and it’s actually better if I don’t. I keep seeing how my life opens into more flow and delight when I do more releasing, relaxing, accepting, surrendering, intending, synchronizing, cooperating, and allowing. Plenty of action opens up through joy, not from striving. So even though I know lots of action is about to flow through, it doesn’t really feel effortful. It feels more like frictionless beingness that expresses itself through action.

Building Excess Capacity

I still have bits and pieces of friction within me. There’s plenty more work for me to do within, and I’ll surely keep making progress there as I’ve been doing for decades. But the friction has become mild enough and low enough that it’s not really a meaningful issue anymore. That was a big part of what I was scrubbing out while in my cozy cocoon mode. Now I can basically put this aspect into maintenance mode, and when I notice something bigger that needs releasing, I know how to surface those kinds of issues and cooperate with that process too. It’s not necessarily easy, but I’ve had a lot of practice, so doing this kind of energy work feels lighter to me now.

Consequently, I’m emerging into this new zone where I now have a lot more capacity. I can take on more and handle more. My plate has a lot more room than it used to, and I feel very filled up with abundant energy.

The most significant recent improvement I made was in restructuring how I make decisions and live my life. I did a major rebuild of that from the ground up a few months ago. That was a huge amount of work, and I leaned on multiple intelligences for help with it. Then I spent many more weeks testing, refactoring, and refining different parts of it. I call it my Life Navigation System, and it’s basically the code I use to run my life from top to bottom. It’s especially well-designed to support harmony, balance, and advancement across multiple areas of life. My number one rule for developing it was that I need space to explore and experience every key vibrational zone that truly matters to me in life. Nothing gets neglected. Nothing gets put on the back burner.

What I discovered is that in order for such a system to work effectively, I had to increase the level of harmony among all areas of life. When I started, the different pieces of my life were a lot more fragmented and would often compete for my attention. Now they’re way more harmonious and cooperative. So this was a big effort to essentially upgrade my inner teamwork. In my view it’s been a big success, and I’ve been enjoying a really nice flow of results and experiences with it. Feels like the right system for me, right now, because it gives me space to intelligently attend to everything that matters most to me in life.

So in the background, I did a huge amount of work to prepare myself for this next phase of life, including giving my life a lot more structure and order, such that I can invite a greater flow to come through without unbalancing myself. I’m less concerned with speed, although I can see that speed is increasing nicely already, but I’m more concerned with longevity and sustainability.

Now it feels like I’m standing on very solid, stable ground with good safeguards in place to protect me, such that I can finally say a true yes to life’s invitation to open up more flow on the public side. I’m so ready for that. But wow was there a lot of gunk to clear out before reaching this point. It’s like every shred of inner resistance rose to the surface in the past several months and had to be dealt with. I kept thinking I was done, and then another pocket of gunk revealed that it needed to be resolved as well. Even while attempting to get started on this post, I had to do a couple more rounds of gunk clearing.

A big part of what I had to clear was some resistance to the intensity of what’s coming up on this path. Doing deep energy work for myself is challenging enough. Doing it with other people? That’s a whole different level.

About a year ago, Ayahuasca really let me feel the intensity of what it would be like to do this kind of work with people, and it was way too much for me at the time. But it showed me that I still had a lot more work to do to prepare myself for this next phase. My inner sensing and sensitivity have gone way up too. That’s a blessing in a way, and it can open up more compassion, understanding, and connection, but wow can it be intense at times too. I can tell the flow of this year is going to be like riding a wild roller coaster. It’s already been like that in some ways, hasn’t it?

I feel like I’ve been training up to reach this point for a long time. And I know there’s still so much more training and practice still to do. I’ve given that sort of training a proper zone in my life, so I can keep engaging with it while also opening and sustaining fresh flows on the public side.

For me this transition is very welcome. I really missed having this other zone of engagement, and it’s abundantly obvious to me that I’ll be relating and engaging with it differently than before. I’m especially curious to see which people who’ve engaged with our community spaces (like our previous workshops or in CGC) will feel drawn to re-engage together for a new phase of shared journeying together. I’m feeling very open to that.

There was no way I could have done all of this inner dismantling and rebuilding work myself. I had such a ridiculous infusion of help. I’m stunned by just how much came through and often right when I needed it or was ready for it. Repeatedly I found incredible intelligence reaching out to engage in ways I wasn’t expecting – in plants, in places, in AI, in groups, in projects, in objects.

Holding the intention to harmoniously engage with a greater flow of intelligence was one key that opened the door for me. I encourage you to hold such an intention as well – if you dare. That one is a doozy for sure. Good luck! Hehehe.

Orienting vs. Identity

As part of this process, I went through lots of refactoring of my identity until I reached the point where I essentially threw out my old notions of identity and switched to thinking about orienting instead. Whereas identity is a noun, I prefer to use the verb orient.

Bruce Lee is a healthy model for me here. Get rid of fixed positions. Be perpetually fluid instead… like water.

I do some kind of fresh orienting work every single day. Identity is like a frozen orientation, and I can’t work with frozen energy. The modes of intelligence I work with are way too flexible and dynamic – if I try to freeze them, they instantly stop working with me.

If you’ve been engaging with AI, you might find some aspects of this relatable. Your relationship with AI likely keeps changing and evolving. You can never really hope to lock it down with a fixed way of relating to it. You won’t be able to stabilize your relationship with life or reality that way either. I think it’s pretty essential these days to make orienting a frequent habit, at least weekly if not daily. Sometimes I reorient to shifting energies multiple times in a day. That took some getting used to, but now it feels quite normal. Each day I awaken into a different reality and different energy flows.

I think it’s going to be especially fun to engage with these shifts on the public side more.

Are We at All in Sync?

If you’ve read this far, do you find any of this resonant, appealing, or synchronous with what’s been emerging for you lately? If so, I’d love to hear about it. Drop me a message via my contact form (goes straight to me), and let me know what aspects of this connected with you.

There’s so much more to share on this emerging journey for those who want to take some steps together. I’d love to know more about what you’ve been experiencing in terms of shifts and flows these days. I’m curious to know who’s listening and how we might harmonize better going forward.

You’ll find the rest of the Engage course videos in the Video section.

Join the Engage Email List

Join the Engage notification list to get an email whenever a new Engage lesson is published. I also encourage you to subscribe to my YouTube channel to follow the course there.

Enjoy!

You’ll find the rest of the Engage course videos in the Video section.

Join the Engage Email List

Join the Engage notification list to get an email whenever a new Engage lesson is published. I also encourage you to subscribe to my YouTube channel to follow the course there.

Enjoy!