Design the Day Before It Designs You

Posted on 01/06/2026 by Boris Clair

This morning I got up at 5am, went for a lovely 30-min run, had breakfast, sat on my patio for a slow meditation, and then did my usual “Pick 6” habit to chose my vibes for the day.

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.

Conscious Growth Club Year 10 Is Open

Posted on 25/04/2026 by Boris Clair

Conscious Growth Club Year 10 is now open for enrollment.

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.

Why I’m Not Joining the Anti-AI Outrage Party

Posted on 21/03/2026 by Boris Clair

Let me share some thoughts about using AI and how I feel about it these days. The short version is that while AI arrived through ethically messy channels, my actual relationship with it feels pretty harmonious and wondrous these days.

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?

Giving Intelligence a Place to Land

Posted on 12/03/2026 by Boris Clair

In recent months, perhaps for the better part of a year, I’ve been supremely interested in intelligence. My current best understanding tells me that intelligence needs a proper place to land – a place of order, structure, and constraints.

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?

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.

I Couldn’t Stop Wasting Time On Social Media. This 1 Trick Helped Me Win Back My Attention

Posted on 14/02/2026 by Boris Clair

When this year started, I knew I had to make drastic changes… because my phone had taken over my life.

Screen time had skyrocketed. Humour circled around TikTok reactions. I found myself scrolling through waves of news horrors and memes before I was fully awake each day.

Enter the Brick, which has emerged as the go-to app for people looking to reset their relationships with their phones.

“Bricking” your phone has now become a verb for people to share the news that they are logging off and to tell others. I actually learned about “bricking” and “unbricking” myself through the loud declarations of other writers and influencers.

I was skeptical at first about whether an app blocker that costs over $50 could be worth it. But I had tried free ways of deleting social media apps and blocking them from my phone through features like Apple’s Screen Time or Android Digital Wellbeing, and they hadn’t worked because they are easy to bypass.

However, the Brick is a little square device that pairs with an app you download on your phone through a QR code. Once you connect your phone to your Brick, you can select which apps you need to block and for which hours of the day.

Then, the real test begins. You tap the physical Brick device with your phone to activate its app-blocking features – you need to touch the Brick again if you want to regain access to your blocked apps.

I was struck by how hard it was to leave the house for a whole day with a bricked phone. I even delayed using it at first because of this anxiety, which only strengthened my resolve that I probably needed to go through with this experiment.

So, after a day of too much scrolling, I put myself to the test and put my Brick on my fridge. Now, I would have to get up from the couch or get back home from work if I wanted to access that tantalising Reddit post.

I am happy to report that after more than a month of use, my brain feels different. I expected the strict enforcement of a Brick to change me – but even I was surprised by how much it did.

What you should know before you try a Brick

I stuck my Brick device on my fridge. Needing to walk 10 steps from my couch to unlock Instagram has curbed my scrolling habits.

The Brick, available for iOS and Android, lets you set modes for “deep work” and “family time” hours, so bricking automatically happens during the natural rhythm of your day. It also keeps a running tally of how many hours you have been bricked each day, and on average, presumably to encourage you to stay strong and go a little longer without unbricking.

If you forget to use the Brick on your phone in your rush out the door, you can also Brick your device by pressing the Brick icon on the app’s homepage from where you are, but you will still need to go back to where your actual Brick is to unlock what you want to unlock.

What I loved about it

The first week I used it, I was surprised and embarrassed by how often my fingers would automatically tap the social media apps my Brick blocked me from accessing. My Brick bouncer would gently scold me whenever I tried to instinctively check Instagram or TikTok.

The app gives you five “emergency” unbricking workarounds if you really need to access an app you have blocked and you’re not near your Brick device, but I have yet to use one. Needing to use “emergency” unbricking to make an Instagram story about the Galentine’s party I attended really put into perspective what exactly I was doing with my one precious life.

The Brick challenged my belief that real-time social media feedback was necessary to stay connected with my friends or to be good at my job. In my opinion, this forced reflection is the Brick’s best benefit. I’ve missed a few direct messages from my friends, I’m not seeing as many funny TikTok memes anymore, and I’m out of the loop on some social media trends, but I feel more in control of what I am consuming. At the very least, I am paying more attention to how I spend my time on my phone.

What I think could be better — and why I’m sticking with my Brick

The Brick costs around $59 for one device. Though I find this little plastic box to be prohibitively expensive for what it is, I like that more than one person can use the same Brick, so you could theoretically get your roommate or partner to split the costs, too. I also like that once you buy it, you don’t need to pay a subscription fee to keep using it, unlike many other apps.

However, bricking yourself is not going to transform you completely.

Catherine Pearlman, a licensed clinical social worker and author of First Phone: A Child’s Guide to Digital Responsibility, Safety, and Etiquette, said the Brick is “a wonderful device,” but can’t be a long-term solution to endless social media scrolling on its own.

“Once you’re home [where your Brick is], the impulse still exists,” she told me. “So it doesn’t actually teach you how to work through that impulse to say…‘How do I really want to spend my time? How do I work through this emotion that I’m trying to avoid by scrolling?’”

Answering those questions is a bigger journey only you can answer. For Pearlman, it meant finding other ways to use her screen-free time.

“I knew I wasn’t going to stop using my phone, but I wanted to have an alternative,” she said as an example. “And then when the newspapers got too upsetting, I went to Kindle. So now I just read books in my Kindle, and I read eight books in January.”

If you want to get serious about blocking social media not just on your phone but on your computer as well (which your Brick cannot access), Pearlman suggested the free website blocker Cold Turkey.

As for me, I’m continuing to brick myself in the evenings, so that I can learn a new screen-free hobby of crochet. Just this past week, my phone screen time dropped 62% compared to the week before. Making loops of crochet rows with my hands feels more satisfying than the loops of TikToks I watched each night, but I don’t think I would have stuck with my new hobby without the Brick’s admonishments.

I’ve gone from my high of nine hours of daily screen time to a more reasonable five or six hours during a workday. I still have lapses where I will go a night without Bricking, but I feel much calmer when I do. When my head is not cluttered with the pulls of social media notifications and enticing Reels, I have time to figure out what I really want to do. And that’s a gift that I think is worth keeping.

Engage 21: Stop Earning Your Personal Life

Posted on 29/01/2026 by Boris Clair

Lesson 21 of the free Engage course invites you to question the idea that personal time must be earned through work. Explore how limiting work hours and choosing abundant personal time can lead to greater clarity, motivation, and a more satisfying life.

[embedded content]

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!

Engage 19: How to Finish What You Start (Without Killing Your Spark)

Posted on 14/01/2026 by Boris Clair

Lesson 19 explores how to finish what you start without killing your creative spark. You’ll learn how to work with different energy phases – inspiration, staging, and completion – so projects flow forward naturally instead of stalling or burning out.

This approach helps you move projects across the finish line while preserving enthusiasm, clarity, and momentum, so you can enjoy a richer and more consistent flow of completed projects and treasured experiences in your life.

[embedded content]

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!

Engage 18: Stretch Goals Reshape Your Identity

Posted on 08/01/2026 by Boris Clair

Lesson 18 of the free Engage course explores how stretch goals can serve as catalysts for inner growth rather than pressure-filled achievements. You’ll learn how to approach ambitious goals by expanding your identity, working through internal limitations, and becoming someone who can step into those experiences with confidence and ease.

[embedded content]

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!

Yin Productivity

Posted on 15/07/2025 by Boris Clair

This week I began exploring a yin-based approach to my days. First I journaled about how I might differentiate yin productivity from yang productivity. I figured yang was mainly about deciding, controlling, and directing the flow of action whereas yin would be more about sensing and allowing action to flow through very flexibly. I also figured that yang would be more outcome-oriented whereas yin might be more experience-oriented.

It’s been a very interesting experience to deliberately lean in a yin direction so far, especially yesterday when I opted to use this approach all day. I did my best to release any attachment to getting any particular task done or advancing any specific project. I focused more on sensing what energies wanted to flow through and be part of my day. All throughout the day, I was more attuned to the energy flows and my inner sensing than I was to objective results.

The flow of action was light and breezy. I felt very relaxed and chill. It was like being carried by currents of energy all through the day. I felt like I wasn’t working particularly hard or doing very much. Yet at the end of the day, I reviewed all that I got done, and it was quite a lot.

I got up at 5am, went for a run, and then met Rachelle in the park to go for a walk together. I started listening to a new audiobook (James Fadiman’s Microdosing book) while running. I read some more of Ram Dass’ Be Here Now and also began reading Alexander Shulgin’s PIHKAL book. So I felt inspired to engage with three different books, yet that didn’t feel like too much because all the books had strong energy ties among them. They cover similar ground from different perspectives. What I read from each book seemed to have a synchronous relationship to the flow of the day. If my thinking had been more objective or yang-like, I’d have likely stuck with one book till it was done. It actually felt nicer to float through a few books.

I made clear, crisp decisions in some areas that were a bit stuck and then advanced them with a variety of easy actions. I sensed it was the right timing for those decisions to flow through, like they were finally ready to emerge and resolve themselves. I also did some journaling to further advance some ideas I’d been working on, and that went very smoothly too. Overall I got my life much better aligned with some long-term avenues that have been unfolding.

I also went out twice to run errands, once in the morning and once in the afternoon. On an objective level, that might seem less efficient than batching the errands. However, the second errand wasn’t really on my radar when I followed my inner nudge to go out to do the first one, even though both were related. I felt like perhaps I needed to advance and complete the first errand for the second to energetically arise.

I liked how both trips infused my day with more variety. These errands were short and easy, and I enjoyed doing them very much as part of the day. They got me away from my desk and out and around other people in the city for a bit. I felt like I was keeping the energy swirling and in positive motion. It was toasty outside (105ºF outside during the second errand – that’s about 41ºC), and the sun’s warmth felt so nice to me too. I’m used to the sunny Vegas summers.

When some ideas came to mind about potential actions to take, I wrote some of them down but only one or two at a time. That was mainly to get them out of my head, so I wouldn’t dwell upon them and could mentally relax more, not with the intention of compiling a to-do list like I might have done in yang mode. I ended up eventually doing all of the items I’d written down, yet I only did them if and when I felt their energy inviting me to go in that direction and feeling good motivation to engage. I did them out of sequence from the order I wrote them yet with no feeling of pressure to do them or not. I felt more of a sense of curiosity about them when I wrote them down, not really sure if they’d come through. They were just options and possibilities, not decisions or commitments. Writing these ideas down was a bit like saying, “I see you. Let me know if you want to flow into action later.”

There was a strangeness to the day as well. I felt like I was attuned to a deeper sense of cooperation and coordination with life. I didn’t feel that I was making decisions as much as I was accepting energy-level invitations that I was sensing. I didn’t feel that those invitations were arising from within me (like from my subconscious) as much as I was picking up on signals being broadcast on a more spirity level of reality. Those signals were very present-moment, always shifting as the day progressed. They were often subtle, more like whispers or hints of possible energy flows. Nothing ever felt demanding or mandatory.

Sometimes I felt a more yang-like idea emerge, in which case I acknowledged it as yang energy and declined it. I could feel that some directions would require more force to advance them. I went with options that felt light and breezy, doing my best to flow into action with them as those invites came through – without hesitation or delay. There was no rushing or pressing. It just felt easier to glide into action once I had a clear enough sense of where the flow was inviting me to go.

I feel my inner senses have become even louder and clearer this year, so this was a great way to practice listening to them more closely, especially when the communication is subtle. I don’t feel this would have worked if my mind was cluttered or pre-occupied with predetermined to-dos. The action flow was great, and I actually felt that the day turned out better, both experientially and in terms of what outcomes got advanced, than if I’d tried to control and direct it based on individual goals. The flow of action also felt very well-synched to my mood and energy levels.

I want to float with this approach all throughout this week as best I can. I’m enjoying it immensely so far. Overall I’d say that yesterday’s flow felt marvelous yet also a bit mysterious.

I’m continuing this process today, and writing and sharing this little blog post happened because it showed up as a very yin-feeling invite this morning. I had no goal or even intention to write or publish anything today. I actually wrote and shared this as a personal update in my exploration log in the CGC forums a few hours prior, following a breezy nudge after breakfast. Then later in the morning, I felt the invite to add a bit more detail and publish it here, sensing that others might appreciate it. Perhaps someone would find this idea timely and synchronous relative to their own explorations. So if this does seem synchronous for you, perhaps this is a special invite flowing through for you to give this yin productivity approach a little test in your own life. Please let me know if you do that and how it goes. It’s nice to compare notes on this sort of thing.

Stepping Into Your Limitless Self With Conscious Growth Club (Last Day to Enroll for 2025)

Posted on 02/05/2025 by Boris Clair

Today (May 1st) is the final day to decide to join us for Year 9 in Conscious Growth Club, and I felt inspired to share some insights about where I see the club flowing in Year 9 and beyond.

Every year the club evolves. This transition from Year 8 to Year 9 is a big advancement with some very powerful shifts opening up.

Leadership Dojo

Many members in CGC have been evolving in the direction of leadership. This has been showing up differently for everyone, but it’s fair to say that it’s not the stale old corporate or hierarchical version of leadership. It’s a much more personal and internal form of leadership. At least that’s where it begins.

This is about leading from within – knowing yourself, standing strong in your core essence, and radiating your light into the world around you, like I shared in this video several months ago: Fill Your Reality With Your Light.

When you step up and take charge of your own life powerful, other people are likely to notice. Those who appreciate similar values to yours will likely feel drawn to you. They’ll be attracted to your centeredness, your resolve, your clarity, and your sense of ease, lightness, and flow. You may end up attracting some sort of following without really trying.

For some members this shows up as a desire to build communities or their own, online or offline. A lot of members have been going through meaningful transformations of their social lives. They no longer feel in tune with their old circles, and it’s important to them to draw more people into their lives who really align with who they are now and who they’re becoming.

One reason this happens is that CGC itself is a model for this kind of social alignment. It’s a community centered around growth, self-development, and truly embodying our best selves. People who value this will find lots of like-minded people inside to connect with. Once they experience how delightful it is to make and have so many friends like this in one place, it can reveal a difficult contrast with their other social circles, which may not feel adequate anymore. Thus begins the journey into assuming more autonomy over one’s social life, and this eventually flows into some kind of leadership experience.

Seeing this aspect of CGC emerging over time has encouraged me to give it more attention and to invite new members into the club who see themselves flowing into an emerging leadership role. So this year I made that a key part of the invite.

That’s yet another reason we don’t invite Trump supporters to join us in CGC. That’s been our policy for years. Trump supporters carry follower vibes by definition. That’s the opposite of our direction in CGC.

There are lots of ways to step into leadership. In CGC we really focus on the inner journey, which involves getting clear about what we want to create and then advancing it into being.

Note that at the beginning of 2017, CGC was just an idea. I began sharing about the idea on my blog back then, inviting people to comment on it and share their feedback. Later that year we opened the doors with an early access phase while we were developing it. Today we’re starting our 9th year together, the club is thriving inside, and we clearly have a bright future together as we continue to advance together. This all began with a decision to step up and make it happen. Many hundreds of other decisions followed – and are still following – as the club continues to evolve.

Relating to People as Their Strong Selves

Since I have a lot of experience watching people grow and seeing how they evolve over time, I often pick up patterns in what’s unfolding for people before they see what’s emerging within themselves. I like to meet people where they are, but I also love to relate to them based on where they appear to be heading.

The better I get to know someone who’s very growth-oriented, the more I can help to hold the vision and the vibes of the stronger and more capable version of them that’s emerging.

For instance, I may interact with someone who’s a bit camera shy, but I can also see that they’re working on it, which may help me see that they’ll eventually get past it altogether. So I can start relating to them as the person they’re becoming, not who they’ve been.

Or I may be talking with a very head-based person, but I can also see they’re making good progress in developing their intuitive side and opening their heart, so I can meet in the the land of emotional expressiveness and keep relating to them as their emerging future self.

Sometimes this surprises people because they’ve never had anyone treat them as the person they’re becoming. Others have usually been treating them as who they’ve been in the past (or some skewed version of that).

I love doing this for people, but it’s definitely best when I get to know someone, so I gain a more specific understanding of where they’re heading.

Holding stronger visions of each other – and for each other – is becoming woven into the fabric of CGC. As more members bear witness to each other’s growth, they’re helping hold those new visions of themselves. That’s really lovely to see.

If you’ve never been in a social circle that holds you in high regard and begins treating you as your stronger and more capable future self, I sense you’d really love and appreciate this aspect of CGC.

Don’t think it’s easy though. The old parts of you may rise up to reject your new self-image – at first – so it can take some time to work through those old limits and release them.

Feeding and Fueling Our Strong Selves

As members have continued to invest in CGC, they’re clearly gotten stronger and more capable. More possibilities are opening up for them. There’s a sense of strength and stability in the core of the club, which is fertile soil for encouraging even more to emerge.

Back in 2018 when I first created the Deep Abundance Integration course, my motivation was largely driven by compassion for people who were struggling with scarcity. I wanted to provide a helpful resource to immerse people in abundance vibes, so they could really lock onto it and transition over, much like I learned to do back in 1999 (the year I went bankrupt).

In the early years of CGC, there was a lot of this helping-people-who-were-struggling mentality in the club too. That fit with the old coaching model, and many coaching calls involved helping people with various forms of stuckness. Today we are way beyond that old mindset and old approach.

Struggles can be endless and cyclical, especially if people keep recreating the same conditions that lead to struggle. Now we’re better at stepping back and inviting those weaker energies to depart, so something stronger and more engaging can emerge.

When this kind of powerful energy surges, many old struggles vanish. Either they become easy to solve because we become stronger, or they’re no longer seen as problems, or we stop creating the conditions that give rise to them. One way or another, CGCers learn to opt out of living in perpetual crisis mode.

Today’s CGC isn’t a good match for people who are mired in distracting problems. It’s a much better fit for people who want to engage with their lives from their core – their strong selves. Then keep building from there.

I like to think of this stronger part of me as my higher self. That’s the version of me that’s fearless, wise, caring, kind, creative, generous, and more. These days my own path of self-development is mainly about coming into greater alignment with this core version of me. I do my best to channel my deepest wellspring of insight and energy into my decisions and actions. That’s been working really well.

Even when I have mundane problems to deal with, I find that I can easily shred them when I’m attuned to my core strengths. Then I can be as patient, methodical, rational, and courageous as needed to solve problems definitively. These kinds of solutions are very satisfying, both during the solution process and afterwards. I know I did my best, so there are no regrets.

This kind of energy is emerging very strongly in the club now. I sense it will be a big part of Year 9 and beyond.

One specific way we’re supporting this energy is with the new Sense & Solve call format that we’re introducing this CGC year. We’re running it the first time on May 15.

High Trust and Intimate Teamwork

CGC is a very kind, intimate, caring group inside. It took some work to get there though, and I’m very protective of this aspect of our culture. In our early years, we attracted some members who were only into self-development for themselves – some prima donna types if you know what I mean. They came to CGC for the content and for their own gains and didn’t participate much in the community aspects, except for their own validation now and then.

We still did our best to serve those members, but I soon realized that we were better off without them. What we do in CGC really is a team effort, and we grow stronger by attracting good team players. So I’ve deliberately positioned the club to make it less palatable to people who aren’t interested in the team aspect.

We’ve come a long way since then, really focusing on attracting more genuine team players and serving them well. CGC has become a space where the givers tend to gain the most. Those who show up and participate and share their growth journeys surely learn a lot more and make bigger strides.

I see us investing even further in this teamwork direction in Year 9 and beyond. That includes involving other members in the live event we’ll be co-creating for April 2026.

All of our calls for Year 9 involve some form of interaction. They’re really not content-based. They’re all designed as group experiences that we share in and create together.

This morning, for example, we had our monthly Intention Infusion call. The call was very well-attended, with lots of members sharing all throughout. This included sharing our individual intentions for the month and also co-creating a group intention. The group intention we chose was limitless vitality, so we’re all pooling our collective intentional energy to intend limitless vitality for each other. This has been a normal rhythm in CGC for the past two years now. Every month we all hold positive intentions for each other’s well-being and advancement.

The core of this community is trust. When people open up and trust more, they tend to thrive in CGC. It’s not like sharing about your life on social media and wondering who will judge you for it.

It usually takes a bit of time for people to get used to a community like this. They come in with their well-developed masks from years of social media engagement. Then they gradually drop those old facades and let us see more of their real selves. That’s where they’re met with so much love, understanding, and connection.

Life really is different when you learn and grow as part of a kind and caring community that has your back. If you don’t get that from CGC, please find some place to get it – a space where you can fully open up and show all parts of the real you and be seen and acknowledged as the beautiful being you are. This includes letting others see your beauty even when you’re not seeing it yet yourself.

This kind of work really lights me up inside. Even after 8 years of serving CGC, I’m still abundantly enthusiastic about it. As I’ve said many times before, this is my forever project. That’s something I learned from Walt Disney because Disneyland was his forever project. The benefit of a forever project is that you have lots of time to keep improving it and optimizing it. You know to be extra thoughtful in making each decision because you’re thinking about how it might ripple out over decades.

Playfulness

I love that we’re so playful in CGC. I really resonate with making self-development lively and fun. I feel we’re landed in a really good range there. We take self-development seriously, and we have serious fun working on it together.

We often crack jokes on the live calls, but we also do our best to keep them light. I really think we bond very well through shared humor. Some members are really great at anchoring humor vibes into the club, and I would love to see even more people like this join us inside because we so appreciate what they bring to the experience.

We already have some great abundance in this area, but I say let’s keep going. Why limit ourselves? Good-natured humor folds really well into our group energy and values.

I sense that this light-hearted playfulness that so many of us share in CGC will be infused into our April 2026 gathering as well, which makes me look forward to it even more.

Range and Variety

I know of no other self-development group that covers as much range and variety as CGC does. We really do cover all aspects of self-development and more.

Take a look at our call types for Year 9. We have 18 different formats now, up from 14 last CGC year. And even within a given format, no two calls are the same. Each call is a unique experience.

In Bear Care we work on boundaries and self-care. In Contribution Café we focus on purpose and service. In Story Lab we use the lens of story to fuse the objective and subjective aspects of our lives into a cohesive plot that’s unfolding. Courage Forge’s theme ought to be pretty obvious. Same goes with Pure Imagination. Mating Call is a new format we’ve added this year to improve our sex lives. And Moonglow is all about receiving and allowing (and not blocking life’s gifts).

I actually drew a significant amount of inspiration from theme parks, particularly Disneyland itself, in designing and evolving CGC’s core structure. I’ve personally spent at least 100 days of my life at Disneyland, including going there with Rachelle for 30 days in a row, six months before we opened CGC. So you can definitely think of CGC as being like a self-development theme park. While our core focus is on self-development, the calls are all designed to be lively, entertaining, and enjoyable as well. I never want the experience for our members to become stale or boring.

The vast majority of our live calls are unrecorded too (only Reflections & Revelations is recorded), so that helps people open up and be more candid as well. I really noticed a positive shift in participation when we shifted from recorded to unrecorded calls a while back. I love that we have so many years to keep tinkering and fine-tuning to discover what works best for our members.

Learning From Each Other’s Growth Journeys

With the CGC forums as part of the experience, there’s even more variety because members can share and discuss anything of interest to them.

I especially love that our discussions and explorations are so focused on helping each other advance. There really isn’t much debating in CGC for the sake of debating. Politics and current events don’t have a big presence in the group. That’s all fair game for discussion, but most CGCers would rather not discuss that sort of thing, especially since they can do that elsewhere on social media all day long if they want.

In CGC the conversations are mainly about personal experiences and explorations as well as how members are figuring out solutions. People discuss their goals, action steps, and their progress a lot. They share the emotional side too, like how life is going and how they’re being affected.

Because we have our own private, members-only spaces, members are a lot more candid, and the shares are often deeper and more detailed than what you’d find elsewhere on the Internet. People share a certain depth in CGC that they wouldn’t trust to Instagram, Facebook, etc.

This is true for me too. While I’ve been very open about my life from 20+ years of blogging and also YouTubing, I share even more depth and detail in CGC. Most of what I share about my ongoing explorations these days is posted in CGC, not outside of it. I just feel drawn to share certain details more with the people I’ve come to know and trust very well. I’m still into sharing openly outside of the group, but with CGC as such a huge part of my life, I don’t feel drawn to share as much outside the club.

I maintain a progress log in the club myself and update it often. It looks like this in the forums and has hundreds of posts. It’s very interactive too since members can ask me anything about the various explorations I’m doing at any given time. Usually I update it multiple times per week. There is so much I’ve shared there that I haven’t shared outside of CGC, such as details about the 3-night ayahuasca ceremony I did in March and how it affected me – it was very powerful.

One experience that’s coming up this month is my first-ever San Pedro ceremony. I’ve never done it before and have been wanting to sit with it for years. I probably won’t blog about it, but I’ll surely share about what it was like in CGC.

Other members maintain progress logs in the club too, and this has consistently been a great way for us to keep tabs on what we’re all doing and how we’re progressing.

A High-Vibe Approach to Self-Development

When I first got into self-development many years ago, my mindset was very objective. I focused on productivity and time management a lot. I thought very algorithmically much of the time, always looking for useful processes and step-by-step approaches. Some of my favorite authors were Brian Tracy and David Allen – both very deliberate and methodical but also immensely head-based.

That was interesting and helpful for some years, but I soon ran into limits with that approach, especially with respect to certain types of goals and lifestyle desires. Some goals just would not budge.

I was able to use that old mindset to have some cool achievements though, such as running a marathon. That was all about showing up, putting in the training time, and being very methodical and tenacious till I crossed the finish line and got my finisher’s medal – done and checked off my bucket list.

But my most interesting breakthroughs did not arise from that type of programmer mindset. For that I really needed to stretch myself to explore more limitless ways of relating to life and reality. I documented that alternative approach very well in the Submersion course, which is based on relating to life far more subjectively. Since then I’ve layered in even more robust and expansive approaches to keep advancing in ways where an overly objective approach falls flat.

I’d say my #1 favorite gift from opening up and pursuing a different self-development path is my relationship with Rachelle. We’ve been together for 15+ years now, married for more than 7 years. She and I host the CGC calls together. I adore her deeply, and I love the life we share together. I also really love that she and I get to serve and support CGC together. We attracted each other from different countries (she’s Canadian) and flowed into a beautiful yet unconventional relationship. I don’t see anyway a relationship like this could have flowed into my life if I’d been stuck in an overly objective mindset. That old limit had to go, so I could open myself to new forms of allowing, inviting, and surrendering.

This type of energy is strongly infused into CGC. I’ve stopped being an apologist about it, and I’ve really gone all-in with a vibrational-first approach – because it works! It takes time for some people to warm up to it, but what keeps them engaged is that this gets results, especially in areas where an objective approach just isn’t moving the needle much.

The objective aspects of life are still important, and objective problem-solving tools are still useful, so we haven’t thrown that out. We do a tremendous amount of fusion in CGC, and that YES-AND approach woven into many of our group calls as well. Our problem-solving methods are part vibrational, part physical. They involve getting into harmony with the solution space and feeling our way into it to ramp up motivation and inspiration. Then we devise practical action steps and flow into them with greater ease.

In recent months I’ve been sharing in the club about using this approach to do various DIY plumbing and electrical projects around the house. I got clear about how I wanted to solve each problem on a vibrational level first, including how I wanted to feel throughout the experience and afterwards. As I locked onto those feelings, I flowing through a compelling action sequence that included watching how-to videos on YouTube, acquiring the needed parts and tools, and doing all the steps to get to completion.

This really taught me a lot about my own best pathways through problems I might otherwise put off. I didn’t want to deal with certain problems because I didn’t understand them well enough, and I didn’t feel very trusting about the prospect of hiring someone to do those projects for me. So I went to the vibe level first and crafted the solution there. For instance, I knew that education could solve the understanding problem, so I resolved to educate myself thoroughly first. I also saw solutions to the trust issue, so I worked through how to find a contractor I could genuinely trust, and I found and hired a fabulous plumber to do some bigger jobs. It all flowed beautifully at the action level once I solved these problems first at the vibrational level.

I can tell this kind of vibrational-physical fusion will be a big part of CGC Year 9 and beyond – again because it works. Problems are much easier to solve when we engage not just our minds but our hearts and spirits as well.

Lightness & Happiness

The energy in some earlier CGC years felt heavier to me. Today it’s a lot lighter feeling inside. There’s more happiness and optimism inside the club these days – and some genuine excitement too, especially since we’re starting a whole new year together starting today.

Years ago, some people were initially drawn to approach CGC like a therapy container – a space for working through unresolved trauma.

I gave it a lot of thought and took concrete steps to move the club well away from that direction. I know this bothered some people, but I’m certain that it was the correct decision. Even back then I knew we needed to move away from that.

I’m not a therapist, and I don’t intend to become one. I really don’t want to meet people in their misery and delve into the ache with them.

I know some great people who do work in the space of trauma, healing, PTSD, etc. Most of them work with plant medicines because that really moves the needle when nothing else will. I’ve seen a tremendous amount of positive changes unfolding for people who need to process and release old trauma.

But that isn’t my path. I know this. I’m not here to serve people while they’re still enmeshed in their trauma. I’m meant to work and live in limitless land. That’s very clear to me.

I’ve done multiple plant medicine journeys where I’ve looked into that space – with ayahuasca, mushrooms, and more – and they all tell me the same thing. I’m not traumatized and never have been, and I’m not here to help people with their trauma. One journey revealed a fun way of framing this, revealing that when I incarnated as a human in this life, I looked at the box to select my trauma for my human character, and I wrote in “Fuck no!” And so that wish was granted.

I’ve had plenty of challenges to deal with in this life, but none have ever traumatized me. That isn’t what I’m here to experience. And it isn’t how I aim to serve.

I am the opposite of traumatized. I’m ridiculously happy, and I thrive when working with other people who are at least pretty happy with their lives, and they want to unfold even more richness.

I work best with people who want to let go of old limits and stretch themselves. They want to grow stronger and become even more capable. They may not be traumatized, but letting go of old limits is still a great challenge, and this is where I most enjoy serving people.

This has also become a big aspect of CGC as well. We’re not here to meet you in your pain. We’re here to help you advance beyond old limits. If you have a lot of unresolved pain to work through first that’s holding you back from even focusing on richer and more expansive forms of self-development, I feel for you, but there are much better teachers and communities that focus on that. I have tremendous respect for them, and I’m friends with some great people in that space, but I definitely don’t aspire to be one of them. I’ve found where I belong and what I’m good at, and I do sense that this is a limit I want to keep because it serves me well, and it opens into a beautiful outlet for serving others very well too.

CGC’s energy is much lighter than what you’d find in trauma-informed spaces. The energy inside is typically very positive, encouraging, optimistic, and expansive. Members are usually very engaged with interesting projects and working on stretching themselves in various ways.

Even when someone is going through a major challenge, they’re met with positive support, not commiseration. This helps people remember their strong selves, which they can use to meet any problem.

Stepping Into Your Limitless Self

Hopefully this run-through gives you a clearer picture of what CGC is like inside now and how we’re continuing to evolve.

I’d say that our limitless vitality intention for May is a good container for our upcoming year in the club as well. This month we’re inviting more energy to flow through our bodies and our lives, so we can enjoy more capacity to investing in what we find most engaging.

If CGC appeals to you, I invite you to join us. There’s still time to come aboard and join us for Year 9 if you sign up today. Otherwise you’ll have to wait till April 2026 for another chance.

I’d recommend perusing the CGC FAQ, and then read through the CGC invite page as you reflect upon the decision (sign-up button is at the bottom of that page.

Lastly, feel free to drop me a message via my contact form if you have any further questions. We always see a lot of people join on the last day – even in the final hours – so I’m used to that!

I know it’s a big decision. Make it a good one!