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Parts of Essex and Hertfordshire will also face the toughest restrictions, the health secretary says.
The new strain may be growing faster in some parts of the country, Health Secretary tells MPs.
I often begin my days by asking: What wants to come through? What energy wants to be expressed?
Then I listen.
Sometimes I listen with my mind or body. Sometimes I listen with my heart. And sometimes it feels like I’m listening with my spirit.
I feel like there’s a collective idea space where thoughts and feelings are always flowing, like radio waves being constantly transmitted. When I tune into that space, I often get ideas for articles. Or I could pull out bigger ideas like for a new course or workshop.
But I don’t have to aim my internal beam-forming antenna in that direction, scanning the cloud of human needs and wants. I can also listen within. I can can scan my own personal energy field and see what wants to come through.
Then different inner voices get my attention to share their desires.
One inner voice would absolutely love to do more in-person workshops. We haven’t done one since 2016, and I was leaning towards doing one in October 2020, but that got nixed with the virus situation. I hear this voice and agree with it. It’s definitely something to look forward to when the timing is right. Zoom is great for the role it plays, and I use it every week, but there’s really no substitute for connecting face to face.
Another inner voice wants to have a more spiritual 2021. That’s the voice encouraging me to eat raw for the whole year since that way of eating makes me feel the most open, sensitive, and synchronized with life. This voice is pleased that I’m on board with the idea, so it waits patiently for me to begin at the start of the year. Meanwhile it seems to be working behind the scenes to prepare me for this shift.
I wonder if there’s some kind of energy linkage between my inner voices and the collective space of ideas. It feels like my internal energies can communicate with this larger field on their own in the background, such as to coordinate events or to arrange synchronicities. When I create certain harmonies with my inner voices, such as by agreeing with them, it feels like I grant them more privileges to take action on my behalf.
This is a mental model I sometimes use, not anything objectively provable, but it does align well with my personal experience. Do you ever feel like some energy-based or thought-based parts of you make arrangements with the rest of reality on your behalf? I’ve seen so many instances of external changes happening shortly after I make meaningful internal decisions, especially decisions that involve saying yes to some under-expressed part of myself.
One example was connecting with Rachelle. We lived 1300 miles away from each other, in different countries. I sometimes feel like our meeting was arranged, like some part of her energy and some part of my energy linked up behind the scenes and recognized our tremendous compatibility. Then they conspired to make us meet in person by removing obstacles and arranging synchronicities. Fortunately we each listened to those internal nudges that spiraled us into a beautiful connection.
I do feel there’s a sort of spiritual permission grant needed to unlock this type of experience. In my case I specifically recall inviting new connections to come into my life while I was still in my first marriage. That was also a time where I was eating a lot of raw foods, which made me extra sensitive to subtle shifts that I might not have noticed if I’d been eating cooked food. So I don’t think this is just a spiritual effect; I think it’s a physical one too.
It feels like the misaligned energies are continuing to move further away and receding into the background. Somehow the louder they scream, the fainter they sound. I feel like this is creating space for more aligned energies to flow through. It’s like how letting go of a partial match creates space for a much better match to flow through. If you’re sensitive to energy flows, you’ll feel this shifting well before you see it, and with experience you’ll trust your inner senses.
With the daily blogging challenge, 2020 was a deep dive into connecting with lots of personal growth ideas. It was also a year of boundary management and lifestyle adjustments. I feel like I had to be extra firm this year in saying “You shall not pass!” to attempted intrusions from stupidity and insanity. I think I did an excellent good job of defending and cleansing my space from such encroachments. It feels like I’ve relegated those energies to their own corral of idiocy, where they’re mostly harmless going forward, other than continuing to annoy those who care to visit. I’m content to steer clear indefinitely; it’s the smell.
Now I feel the energy shifting in a new direction, especially since the election. As I continue to listen within, another part of me says that it wants to have a caring and connected 2021. Whereas 2020 was predominantly a year of ideas, boundaries, and lifestyle adjustments, I sense that 2021 is setting itself up to be a year of people, relationships, friendships, and emotional depth.
This doesn’t feel like a personal need or desire though. I feel pretty content, satisfied, and non-needy in this area of life. It feels like I’m hearing a collective desire from the larger energy field. I can listen to that energy field directly, and the desire for more human connection and intimacy seems loud and chaotic, overflowing with unmet needs. But when I listen internally, I hear a softer and quieter part of me that wants to help with this.
I feel like the energy flow of 2020 was about testing, challenging, clarifying, releasing, and standing firm. It was a tremendous year of truth alignment.
For 2021 I sense a year of stronger love and oneness alignment, but only with very compatible people, not universally with everyone. I can’t say what form this will take, but it feels like different parts of my personal energy field are picking up on this larger signal, and so they’re offering up their own invitations on how to align with this “big energy” in motion.
I do not see 2021 as a year of healing and reconciliation. I sense that 2020 involved a split that was meant to happen, with some people going one way and some going another way. We’ve made some key energetic choices this year. We’ve said a firm yes to some types of invitations and a firm no to others, and we’ve seen other people make different choices. It’s been a polarizing year, hasn’t it?
This year I was challenged to decide whether I was going to be anti-racist or to continue clinging to the feeble non-racist label. I voted for first time ever. I made decisions that caused some people to reject me or to feel rejected by me, while other people sensed and expressed a stronger connection to me than ever (the feeling is mutual). I think it was important and necessary to go through this. It felt like a year of multiple tests, with answers that will determine the future direction of people’s lives and experiences for many years to come. Has it been that kind of year for you?
It feels like the testing part is essentially over, at least in terms of major alignment decisions. Soon it will be time to co-create something new, and now we’re in an incubation phase before that fresh energy really opens up.
I feel like I’ve released and corrected multiple misalignments this year, so I no longer need to carry those misalignments into 2021 and beyond. I don’t feel that this is for reasons of speed but for reasons of depth. It now seems possible to go deeper in certain directions where misaligned energies would create drag and friction, frustrating the most aligned people who aren’t in the mood for friction and just want to explore flow, abundance, and appreciation together. This year the misaligned have had to step aside so that certain high-alignment experiences can be made real for the people who are ready for them.
I think a key question asked of me this year was: Are you willing to put your energy where your intentions are?
And the companion question: Are you willing to withdraw your energy from the friction and drag?
Letting go of the friction and drag is especially difficult when it’s in human form… when someone you know firmly plants their flag in drag territory, and you have to let them have that experience without you. You have to choose forgiveness so you can lighten up your energy and go where you need to go next. Note that forgiveness isn’t the same as reconciliation or compromise (which could keep you stuck in the drag).
So these are some answers that come through when I ask the questions that I shared at the beginning of this post. Does any of this resonate with you?
Surgeries in more than 100 locations are receiving their first deliveries of the Pfizer jab.
Here’s a simple rule of thumb that I learned at the start of the pandemic:
If you think you’re being reasonably cautious, you’re probably taking on too much risk. If you think you’re being unreasonably cautious, you’re probably doing it right.
This made sense to me, so I aimed to keep my COVID-prevention standards higher than I thought was reasonable. I sought to keep them at a level that made me wonder if I was overdoing it.
Since the start of the pandemic, Rachelle and I haven’t had friends or family over, we stopped doing in-person meetups, and we stopped all travel. We have groceries delivered, or we shop infrequently at late hours when stores are mostly empty. We wash our hands many times per day, including after handling any packages that have been delivered. We wear masks of course. We’ve been very hermit-like and cautious. We began shifting our lifestyles sooner than required. I also began writing blog posts in early March to warn people about what was predictably coming.
Some people wrote to me to say that I was being unreasonably alarmist. Good, I thought. That’s an indication I’m heading in the right direction. Later some people shared that my writings encouraged them to alter their behaviors in some specific situations, including in ways that may have saved some lives.
Under the circumstances, I think these standards have been reasonable, but it sometimes felt unreasonable, and sometimes other people said it was unreasonable. In this case this suggests that maybe it’s an adequate standard, not an excessive one.
In the USA we’re in the midst of the biggest surge of reported infections since this started, now around 200-250K new ones per day. My home state of Nevada just reported 3733 infections in one day, its biggest single day by far and about 10X what we were seeing during the summer. I know someone who is one of those 3733; he and I spoke at some events together in previous years. Now he’s very sick.
When people get diagnosed with COVID, they may seem surprised because they felt that their prevention standards were reasonable. They had already tightened up, It seems unfair that this wasn’t enough to prevent infection.
This strikes me as a pattern we see in so many other areas of life as well.
How could I get diabetes, heart disease, or cancer? I was eating a reasonable diet, surely better than most.
How could I be getting laid off? I’m one of the better employees.
How could my spouse be leaving? Our marriage was reasonably good.
If the reasonable standard is a little bit above average, you will probably still succumb to a major lifestyle disease like cancer or heart disease. You could still be laid off. Your partner could still leave.
In many areas of life, being above average isn’t a very good standard results-wise.
A reasonable standard for COVID prevention will probably seem unreasonably strict. A lot of people are being sloppy while thinking they’re doing just fine. A million people in the USA are being diagnosed with COVID infections every 4-5 days. How many of them thought that their prevention standards were reasonable?
Diet is one area where I wouldn’t want to go anywhere near the standards that other people consider reasonable. Eating what other people consider reasonably healthy means having a ridiculously low standard that invites physical, mental, and emotional degradation. It means living as a shadow of one’s true self, always hampered by unseen layers of mental and emotional sludge.
My relationship with Rachelle seems unreasonably good. Sometimes I feel like we’re unfairly blessed to have found each other. But then I wonder where I learned my old standard for comparison. I learned it from other relationships I’ve seen, including relationships that people felt were okay or pretty good. But given the status of most relationships, is it good enough to have a reasonably good relationship?
If your relationship seems unreasonably good, maybe you’re just doing it right. Perhaps it only seems special because the backdrop of society has a low baseline for what it considers decent. Lots of movies tell us how little compatibility is needed for a couple to fall in love and live happily ever after.
So perhaps I just have a reasonable relationship, and it only seems unreasonably good because I broke away from society’s weak standards for what’s “good enough.” I found someone that I really enjoy spending time with and who enjoys and appreciates me as much as I enjoy her. Is it reasonable or unreasonable to love spending time with your spouse? Even under months of relative isolation together, we still love and enjoy spending lots of time together.
Looking back on my life, I can see that when I broke away from what society taught me was reasonable, and I stepped into the unreasonable, I had a tremendous growth experience. This doesn’t always mean that my standards were higher, but they were different. Sometimes my choices would be labeled as weird or reckless, but in retrospect I was just doing what made sense under the circumstances.
It takes time to get used to a standard that people may find strange or unreasonable. Is it reasonable or unreasonable that I haven’t had a job in more than 28 years? That just seems like a normal and sensible way to live. Why would I want a boss telling me what to do each day? Why would I want someone else assigning me work? It seems reasonable to choose my own projects. But to other people this standard somehow seems unreasonable or odd.
Was it really unreasonable to observe during the early days of the Web in the mid-1990s that there was a pathway to generating income online? Was it unreasonable to conclude that that could be a more interesting and rewarding long-term investment than seeking traditional employment? That wasn’t unreasonable at all. It was actually quite a reasonable decision to make. Lots of people made similar decisions back then.
To follow your own path with a heart and to get better results than you otherwise would, you have to be willing to do what other people think is strange or unreasonable. Since some of society’s rules about reasonableness have surely infected your own thinking as well this means that you also have to sometimes do what you perceive to be unreasonable. You have to challenge your assessments of what’s really reasonable and right for you.
You may tell yourself that a certain path is reasonable, but how do you really feel about it on the inside? Do you think it might be an intelligent bet?
Do you ever feel that your job is dreadfully boring? Do you ever daydream about doing something more purposeful? Does doing purposeful and meaningful work seem reasonable to you? Or it that just a pipe dream? Of course it’s reasonable.
Do you ever wonder what it would be like to be in a very loving, caring, affection, and rewarding relationship with a partner who loves and appreciates you too? If you told people what kind of relationship you really wanted, would they accuse you of being unreasonable? It’s actually very reasonable to want and to experience such a relationship. Why should you settle for less?
Consider this: If no one is accusing you of being unreasonable, you’re doing the game of life all wrong.
Standards that may seem unreasonable to other people can yield wonderful results.
I wouldn’t have the business, diet, lifestyle, relationship, or creative flow that I have now if I wasn’t willing to step into unreasonable territory again and again. This includes doing what I previously considered unreasonable too. I had to purge socially conditioned standards of reasonableness and unreasonableness from my thinking, so I could make more intelligent decisions. I invite you to challenge your own thinking here as well, so you can do what’s intelligent for you, regardless of how unreasonable it may seem.
Can you get yourself to do what seems unreasonable? Can you explore that space? That space is where so many juicy opportunities exist, just waiting for you to tap them.
Are your COVID-prevention efforts intelligent under the circumstances? Could you do more? Would raising your standards be intelligent, or would it really be excessive? What if your higher standards prevent just one more death? Imagine someone getting to live a significantly longer life because you took on a bit more inconvenience for several months.
Where else could you elevate your standards? Where else could you dance with the unreasonable?
Note that while some people will accuse you of going too far, you’ll also attract and encounter people who see the value in what you’re doing, and they’ll appreciate you for it. Do you want more people like this in your life? Step into unreasonable space, and they’ll show up.
Here’s another way to frame this: You have a relationship with whatever you (initially) consider to be unreasonable. What’s the nature of this relationship? Will you always shun the unreasonable? Will you always reject it?
I prefer to have a different relationship with the unreasonable. I like to notice it and acknowledge its presence. I like to be curious about it and to explore how I really feel about it. I like to poke it and study it, but it often feels like it’s poking and studying me. Then I may enjoy dating it or dancing with it, even as it continues to tease and seduce me. And if I like it, I may eventually enjoy a long-term, committed relationship with it.
It seems reasonable to go through these phases slowly and gradually. So there’s also the relationship with speed to consider. For certain opportunities, it’s riskier to move too slowly, and it’s more intelligent to go at a pacing that feels unreasonably fast.
How do you feel about your current calibration here? Do you see room for improvement in your relationship with the unreasonable? A good place to start is to simply decide that it’s time to upgrade this relationship. Maybe you’d benefit by developing an unreasonably good relationship with the unreasonable. 😉
NHS bosses urge “extreme caution” over moving areas to lower tiers when England’s measures are reviewed.
Some 67 local authorities in England are taking part in the community testing schemes.
You may think of 30-day or 365-day challenges as requiring a lot of discipline, but I tend to think of them more often as experiential deep dives.
One of the main reasons I do them is for curiosity. Another reason is to add more richness to my life. And yet another motivating factor is to gain the memories of having done them.
This year’s challenge of daily blogging doesn’t require much discipline. And I didn’t really expect it to challenge me too much in this area. Writing is already a well-developed strength of mine, and with only 20 days left in the year, it’s a simple matter to finish it.
So if not for building more discipline or skill, why bother doing it?
I wanted to know what it would be like to publish something every day for a year. How does that impact my life and lifestyle? Do I like it? Would I ever be tempted to do it again? What might I learn about myself from this? How might it affect my connection with my readers?
Based on those intentions, I’d say this experiment succeeded. I did learn something useful from it. It’s good to know what this faster pace of writing and publishing feels like. It’s been interesting to explore this level of consistency.
I didn’t expect to go beyond one year with this approach, and that still rings true. It’s only for 2020 that I’m doing this. I won’t make this a long-term habit beyond a year. But I wanted to devote one year of my life to this experience. I’m glad that I’ll have the memory of doing this for a full year.
We can explore many modes of living that we don’t expect to continue beyond a certain point. These add richness, variety, and wisdom to our lives. You never really know what something will be like till you experience it. You’ll understand the possibility space around you so much better when you actively explore a lot more of it. A great way to explore is to define a fixed-length challenge with clear parameters and boundaries. Pick a new region of your possibility space, rent a virtual apartment there, and map it from the inside.
When I explore around the edges of my default lifestyle, I grow more certain and confident that I’m making good long-term decisions. Temporary explorations help me release otherwise distracting temptations. I often learn that my previous approach was better, and I feel less doubtful about it. It’s like visiting other cities and appreciating your hometown more.
Every year that I didn’t test daily blogging would be another year that I’d continue wondering about it. Now I’ll never have to wonder about it again. I know what it’s like from direct experience.
In 2021 I want to eat raw for the whole year. This isn’t a discipline challenge either. This is another experiential challenge. I want to know what it’s like to go for a full year with a raw diet and lifestyle. I’ve done six months before, so I know I can do a year. Mostly this is a gift I want to give myself. Eating raw shifts my life into a more spiritual, aligned, and synchronous direction… almost magical in a way. I’m really in the mood for that kind of year.
A nice way to think of 30-day (or longer) challenges is to see them as experiential gifts you give to yourself. How would you like to enrich your life? What experiences would you like to gain? What memories do you want to accumulate?
People who successfully complete these challenges rarely regret them. The gains in self-knowledge and wisdom almost always rise above the minor inconveniences and lifestyle adjustments.
What kinds of gifts will you value in the years ahead, even if they’re temporary experiences? What do you keep wondering about? Where do you keep asking, “What if?”
The US Food and Drug Administration gave its approval late on Friday after White House pressure.
