TL;DR: The author shares a client “Claude’s” journey, which proves real change begins with real presence. When clients fully engage in the Positively Focused practice, they unlock powerful manifestations, deep clarity, and lasting emotional alignment.
When it comes to living a Charmed Life, how we show up to the Positively Focused practice matters.
That’s the lesson a client “Claude” is experiencing firsthand. Claude came into the Positively Focused practice holding years of negative momentum. His relationships — with his wife, his mother, and most poignantly, himself — were filled with tension, resistance, and guilt. And yet, he remembered a different version of himself; As a teenager, Claude was athletic, magnetic, and full of life.
“He could do anything and excel,” his sister, who also is a client, once said of Claude. His high school coaches said he had the talent to go pro in both baseball and golf, she told me. That sovereign, high-flying version of him still existed. But he didn’t know how to get back there.
Enter the practice.
A Necessary Life Rebound
Claude found Positively Focused in the aftermath of a particularly difficult stretch. During COVID, he had aligned with some powerful, fear-based narratives circulating online. The government is lying. The vaccine is dangerous. Masks are a scam. These weren’t just passive beliefs—he began advocating them, urging those around him to wake up to what he thought was “truth.”
But here’s the thing: when we advocate for disempowering stories, even if we believe we’re fighting for justice, we attract realities consistent with our alignment. In Claude’s case, that meant alienating loved ones, losing friendships, and watching his business crumble.
This mirrored my own experience years ago when I was heavily advocating for Copiosis. I believed the world needed to change. I had strong opinions about capitalism and money—and as I rallied against them, those very things became absent in my own life. It wasn’t until I released that resistance, aligned with what I wanted, and stopped pushing against what I didn’t, that my finances and life began to rebound.
Claude’s trajectory looked the same.
He began the Positively Focused practice with sincere desire, but with a major obstacle: belief in his own unworthiness. When someone holds the belief that the Universe doesn’t have their back, they can say all the affirmations they want—but the vibration isn’t clean. The practice doesn’t land. That’s what was happening for Claude.
He told me, “I’m doing the processes, but nothing’s changing.”
I asked him, “Are you meaning it? Are you feeling it when you do it, or just reciting words?”
He paused. “I guess I’m just going through the motions.”
Exactly.
The Power Of The Practice
The practice works when you mean it. Not with perfection. Not with forced effort. But with sincerity, willingness, and presence. When you bring your heart to the process, it transforms you.
Another client recently experienced this truth in the most spectacular way. Like Claude, he had a deep well of unworthiness and years of misanthropy. He, too, was doing the practice—his own version of it, that is. And not surprisingly, it wasn’t working. But the moment he got “militant,” as he put it, about doing the processes as prescribed—with real feeling, commitment, and desire—everything shifted.
A woman approached him, asked for his number, and took him out on a date, paying for everything. That had never happened to him before. You can read that story here.
These aren’t stories of luck or coincidence. They are examples of alignment. They are what happens when we move from lip service to devotion.
And devotion doesn’t mean doing the process perfectly. It means doing it deliberately, it means, as I often tell clients, bringing your whole self to it. It means not just saying, “I love that the Universe has my back,” but feeling into that knowing. Even if just for a few seconds.
That’s when the magic unfolds. That’s when we feel the resonance of our Broader Perspective. And that’s when reality starts to shift.
Lining Up With Our Sovereignty
Claude is starting to see this now. He’s realizing that the ease, joy, and sovereignty he remembers isn’t lost. It’s right here—on the other side of the vibration he’s practicing.
As I told another client this week, “Whatever we look for in life, that’s what we’re going to see. So why not look for the positive aspects?”
The Positively Focused practice is designed to help anyone do just that. But like life itself, it only works when we show up fully. Not because we should. But because we want to.
When we mean it, life responds. Not in theory. In manifestation. In real-world results that confirm our expansion is underway.
And that’s the point: We’re not here to fix the world. We’re here to align with the version of it that matches our joy. Do that and everything else lines up—including the relationships, the finances, the sovereignty, and the dreams we thought we left behind.
Claude’s story is still unfolding. But already, the light is coming through. Because he’s beginning to mean it.
Several people bursted into a fight outside my apartment yesterday morning. It was intense. “Ass” “bitch” and “nigger” flew from mouths with extreme vitriol. A woman was in pain. I didn’t hear the man as much. She took all the airtime and used that to take out all the compassion that probably once existed between them.
The argument sparked as I sat cross-legged in meditation. At first it distracted me. I sat contemplating dreams I had just moments before I awoke. But then I allowed an important, accurate realization; The fact that these furious people existed in my experience meant that what was happening outside my apartment also was happening inside me.
At that moment I stopped contemplating dreams. I gave my full meditative focus to the fight. Not the one out there, but the one in me, the one that had me a match to that experience outside. After all, that experience is in my awareness because something in me has me being a match to that.
Spiritual alchemy
That’s when I recalled a moment, not my best moment, when I was like those people outside my apartment. My ex-wife and I, ironically, had just came from an Abraham seminar. This was near the end of that marriage and we both were raw; not unlike those arguing outside this morning. And, like those folks, my ex and I got into an intense argument, again, not unlike what I witnessed this morning. All in a public space.
Recalling this, I got how I was a match to this fight unfolding outside my apartment. And so, like I did with my client this past week, I allowed myself to rise to an even higher vibration. One not of compassion for those folks, but of clarity that their experience, as awful as it may be for them right now, was a gift of transmutation, of spiritual alchemy, for me.
So I blessed them.
I knew in doing so, my high vibration, somehow, would influence their fight. Sure enough, right at that moment, their fight ended and calm returned outside. As that happened, a deep peace came over me. The same peace I felt when I reflected well-being to that client this week and her allergy symptoms went away.
A Return to Source
I know I am everything in my experience. Everything in my experience is a reflection of what’s inside me. Because of that, I can bring, what some people like to call, healing to the world. But only my inner world, which then gets reflected in the world outside, which is a reflection of the one inside.
Is it really “healing” though? That implies something is broken and that is never the case. What it really is, is personal expansion, a return to dynamic balance with the pure positive energy of All That Is, aided by the external reflection humans want to call physical reality.
I love knowing this. I love my experience this morning that had me come to such clarity. And I know in some small way, I changed the trajectory of those two who were in so much pain.
TLDR: The writer discusses their journey to master astral projection through soothing resistance and believing it’s possible, as recent deliberate steps lead to significant progress and heightened spiritual awareness.
As mentioned in previous posts, I’m soothing resistance so that I can enjoy “astral projections”. By “soothing resistance” I mean letting go of beliefs preventing being able to leave my body.
Since everything is possible, doing this is easy. We all do it, after all. Every night we “dream” that’s what we’re doing. We’re traveling astrally.
So projecting my consciousness outside my body isn’t something to “learn”. Rather, it’s something to “allow”. How do we allow? We do it by soothing beliefs making doing so seem impossible.
This post updates my progress so far.
Let’s dive in.
Moving beyond mind
Previous out of body travels were predominantly involuntary experiences. They came unexpectedly. One minute I’d be in my body. The next, I was out. These mostly happened while sleeping or meditating. That makes sense because resistant beliefs aren’t active in those mind states. Especially beliefs that trigger fear of the experience.
Meanwhile, my Broader Perspective knows how to work around those beliefs. This is the case with all desires. Broader Perspective wends its way through what Abraham calls “the cracks of least resistance”. These are pathways through our resistant beliefs, beliefs standing between where we are and what we want. In this way our Broader Perspective knows better than our ego awareness how to manifest desires. This explains why it’s not our ego’s job to figure out how something must happen.
Besides, ego consciousness isn’t equipped to do that. That’s why when we focus on the how, we usually get bogged down in our befuddlement. Brains are physical manifestations of ego consciousness. They are not equipped to understand the how.
Traveling outside the body necessitates leaving all that behind. I must be getting better at doing that because my recent results are astounding.
Deliberate baby steps…
Since I had an adverse reaction long ago to a particularly powerful awakening moment, my Broader Perspective is easing me through the “how”. This process therefore feels extremely gradual. My Broader Perspective knows which of my beliefs could shut down my experience. I can feel that awareness working in me.
Just to clarify; our Broader Perspective isn’t outside is. It’s not a god or other divine being separate from what we are. Our Broader Perspective IS us. It is that aspect of us which remains in nonphysical. It remains there so as to guide the other aspect of us which comes into these physical bodies.
It’s therefore a mistake to picture Broader Perspective as separate from us. Doing that can introduce distortions in beliefs. Distortions that can make what I’m up to difficult or impossible.
Since I’m not making that mistake, I’m finding progress towards leaving my body happening consistently as weeks go by. It’s still gradual. No earth-shaking, amazing occurrences are surprising me. Instead, expansion into astral travel abilities feels like deliberate, baby steps to eventually sojourning through creation while my body lies in repose on my bed.
I’ll share what those baby steps feel like next.
Perceiving the ephemeral
It’s 4:06 as I’m writing this. I just came out of a pleasing meditation. I typically meditate for between an hour and 90 minutes around this time every morning. Usually between two and four AM. I believe those hours hold special energies for such practices.
Coming out of meditation, I received an impulse to write this post.
While prepping for bed last night, I felt familiar urging of my Broader Perspective. It encouraged me to settle my mind and focus in ways that heighten spiritual awareness. Doing so, I can feel varying degrees of vibrations. It’s extremely subtle. Perceiving vibration this way results from a rigorous spiritual practice involving of a lot of meditation and other Positively Focused practices.
I really did write this in the early morning!
While in that heightened awareness and perceiving those frequencies, I also felt my Broader Perspective guiding me to “feel” my ephemeral presence, my “spirit body”, or that ethereal body that is my inner energetic being. I know all that sounds extremely “woo”. But how else can I explain it? It really is a “you had to be there” moment. In other words, having the experience is a better way of explaining this than trying to explain it.
Anyway, while focused on that energy body, I didn’t have to really do anything other than focus on it. Not with a “hard” focus though. Instead I do better perceiving it when I focus like I do when using peripheral vision. Or maybe seeing things in really low light. I’m not looking directly at the thing, but see it anyway. Does that make sense?
I hope so.
Gaining comfort with the ephemeral
As I focused on that energy body, I felt it/me becoming more and more distinct from my physical body. And this is where the progress happened.
Rather than try to will a travel experience, I instead decided to focus on “feeling” or “witnessing” that ephemeral feeling; the feeling of what that energy body feels like. It was like running my physical hands all over my physical body. Only I was doing that with “energy hands” over my “energy body”. I knew this was the step to take because it would accomplish two things.
One it would amplify the experience by confirming what was happening. It would also soothe resistant beliefs. After all, I can’t disbelieve an experience I’m actually having, can I?
Second, it would give me greater control, comfort and familiarity with this new-to-my-ego experience. That was important. It was important because my ego is responsible for violently shutting down that powerful awakening experience I had long ago. And I didn’t want to repeat that experience.
Enjoying the peak moment
So I remained in that state feeling myself for probably 40 minutes. It felt amazing! And in doing that I also felt the “boundary” between my physical body and this energy one. It literally felt like the two were slightly out of sync. Which is exactly what it should feel like as one separates from the other!
Then, at one moment, I decided to try coming back into the physical body. When I did, my legs “jiggled” and I felt an electric wave move through them. It was like the body was receiving into itself the energetic sensation of “me” returning to “it”!
I’m sure you can imagine how amazing that experience felt.
After a few more of these moments, I decided to fully re-enter the physical body. When I did I noticed something very peculiar. And this was the peak moment of this whole experience.
In my body I didn’t feel cold. But when I touched certain parts of my body with my physical hands —my knees, the top of my feet, for example— they felt VERY cold. Again, I didn’t feel cold in my body. But parts of my body, when touched with my physical hands did feel cold.
The cold surfaces correlated with parts of the body I would have left “last” as I “rose” out of the body. I was on my back. The parts I touched were all parts at the upper most part of my body in repose.
This all happened while laying toasty under a fleece blanket, a fleece top sheet, fleece bottom sheet and a down duvet. There was no physical-reality explanation for feeling cold. Especially in the locations where I felt cold!
You had to be there!
Ok. So I get this may not sound very thrilling. I swear you need to have the experience to really get it. Nevertheless I’m THRILLED with these results.
While writing this, I’m eager about experiments I want to run to further improve my awareness. I want to visit friend’s locations, observe things I could only see were I there, then call my friends and report what I saw. Then I want to travel to distant places and see what I can bring back.
That’s right, Seth says I can even travel to such places and actually bring back physical artifacts from those destinations. Can you imagine!?
I can!
I’m eager for more of this. And I deeply appreciate All That Is and my core intention, both of which are leading me on this auspicious trajectory.
Maybe my journey is inspiring you to take your own. If so, I can help, obviously. Become a client! Let’s do this.
The power of being Positively Focused shows up most when feeling negative emotions. The following true story shows what to do when one feels such emotions.
I woke Sunday morning to powerful, clear dreams, but also felt negative emotion. It doesn’t matter what the emotions were about. What matters is what I did.
Here’s what I wrote in my journal in response to this realization. Doing something like this anytime negative emotion shows up makes a ton of difference:
Right this moment I am at the same time present to my powerful expanding self and my currently active beliefs.
I know the more I lean toward the first, not only do I create more of that, but the second soothes into its rightful place: subordinate to my dominant powerful desire. I appreciate therefore the combination, because in the combination I get to choose.
I get to choose leaning toward my desires
I get to choose focus, deliberate focus
I get to create a reality consistent with what I want
I know focusing feels really good as it does now
I know focusing on my desires is the gift the negative emotion brings
Therefore I appreciate the negative emotion
I know negative emotion was once positive belief
I can appreciate the negative emotion
I know the negative emotion is indicating beliefs I still hold are active
This is purposeful and good
I know those beliefs once served me
I can appreciate the negative emotion
I can appreciate the beliefs too
And as I sit here in my bed, first thing in the morning, I feel the power of my focus. I feel the shifting of the balance of my belief and desire.
I like what I’ve just done
It feels subtle but sure
I feel the shift from slight dominant negative focus to slight dominant positive focus
I appreciate that my positively focused practice allows me to recognize the subtle distinction
For now I can shift my entire reality experience toward more and better
This feels really good
This feels like positive emotion
“I’m feeling happier”
But that statement still contains a little bit of negative emotion
My happiness is relative to my previous negative feelings
“I feel happy”, feels better
It is focused specifically in the now, with no relation to the past
This is the work and I love it
My happiness now has turned to appreciation
Now my appreciation has turned into eagerness and passion
I love feeling eagerness and passion
Now my eagerness and passion has turned to love
I love feeling love.
So in this process I just went through, I received inspiration from previous awarenesses, which allowed me to know that the combination of negative belief and positive expectation will always be. For the combination allows an eternal being ensconced in the body, which is what I am, to choose.
To choose what? To choose what’s next.
So much happened in the last four minutes doing this practice. I love how much better I feel now just by speaking these words
I love how good I’m feeling
It feels really really good
It feels like joy
It feels like self transformation
If feels like fun
It feels like self love
I know the more I do this, the better my life gets. I also know the better my life gets, the better it can get, for there is no upper limit on how good things can be.
I feel so much better. I feel positively focused. I’ve literally changed my reality. I feel in love with life and in love with myself.
Now, I recognize I create my reality. Since the past is just another reality, I also re-create my past. That’s what happened this holiday season.
I’m sharing this for the many people who, like me, struggle with holidays. I know now “struggle” is optional. No matter how bad I used to feel, this year, I’m having the best Thanksgiving ever, in large part thanks to my house mate, who I’ll call Kimberly.
I’m going to relate how I transformed my holiday experience while interspersing some theory. If you want to know how all this works as a cohesive living approach I call Positively Focused, please visit my website. There you can schedule a free 30-minute 1:1 in which I’ll answer any questions at no cost to you.
How I transformed the Thanksgiving holiday in less than 15 minutes.
My house mate Kimberly is a manifestation I created after a wonderful ordeal involving previous house mates. In January I’ll tell that story.
Kimberly’s arrival fulfilled many desires. I know though that all fulfilled desires contain within them seeds for more consciousness expansion. That usually looks like “negative” experiences, although they aren’t that. Indeed, what happened Thanksgiving morning was perfect.
My potato au gratin. Yum!
Excitement filled our little home the night before. We bought an enormous turkey, planned several decadent side dishes and even went in together on a new projector to watch Killing Eve and Uncle Frank, Amazon’s new feel-good holiday movie.
Settled in for the night, we anticipated a wonderful morning cooking food, listening to music and generally enjoying time together.
That’s not what happened, at first
I’m an early riser. Kimberly usually wakes later. I got up eager for our culinary adventure. But as I got things ready, I noticed she had made a bag of popcorn late last night. That meant, I realized, that she might not get up early enough.
Little did I know she had planned on joining me. She even set an alarm. But something went wrong. Little did I know how “going wrong” presents enormous gifts.
For hours I relished the morning, preparing our dishes. As turkey dressing time neared though, Kimberly’s absence loomed large. Where was she?
My veggie medley and the au gratin all ready to eat. Ignore the sponge on the range 😂
It was a passing thought at first. Then it turned into worry. Then it turned into resentment. Kimberly wasn’t meeting my expectations, expectations I thought we shared.
That’s not her purpose though
Kimberly need not meet my expectations. No one lives to meet my expectations. When I got that a while ago, I mostly stopped resenting people when they did their own thing.
Everyone comes into reality pursuing their fulfillment, whatever that looks like. The paradox is, when a person shows up in my reality, pursuing their fulfillment, I know now they aren’t real, objective people. Instead, they reflect back to me beliefs I hold in my Belief Constellation even while they pursue individual self-fulfillment.
Other people (as well as everything else in my reality) are physicalized versions of beliefs active in me. I tested this over several years. Improving my beliefs always changed people’s behavior, especially the way they treated me.
Today, people in my life are angels. They show me active beliefs in my Moment of Becoming on their way to becoming my tangible reality. Realities I want I welcome. Realities I don’t want I know I can do something about.
Our turkey cooking its patutti off. LOL
Here’s what that looks like
I knew from years of Positively Focused practice that resentment and worry had nothing to do with Kimberly. Instead they indicated beliefs active that drew into my now, an experience I preferred not having.
Realizing that I did something about it. First, I looked inside to see what thoughts/beliefs I activated. After all, I had enjoyed, up to that moment, being in the kitchen by myself, making all this food my way, without having to compromise anything about what I was doing. It was fun!
My exploration showed old beliefs I created as a kid active in my now. They were about my parents, my family and holidays with them. That’s when Kimberly offered an amazing opportunity. I could clean up those old beliefs and, simultaneously, clean up how I experienced my now, create better future experiences and transform the past too!
Once I got that I stopped preparing meals. I went to my room, set a 15 minute timer, then went into deliberate focus. In that focus I realized/remembered the following:
Kimberly is a manifestation. She is not real.
Kimberly is a manifestation of my entire Belief Constellation embodied in an apparition in my evolving now consciousness.
As such, constructively using realizations represents allows stronger connections with my Personal Trinity. Reacting any other way creates unwanted futures.
Kimberly’s choices are hers and those acts aren’t about me. But make them about me when I interpret them as such!
Such a wonderful gift.
Circumstances in life do this all day every day. People, objects, experiences all are physical representations of my ongoing beliefs.
For better or worse, most people don’t know this, so they interact with their reality as though it is separate, an objective reality apart from who they are, what they are and what they’re believing.
Even among those who know physical reality is a mirror of one’s internal reality, few know what to do with that information.
Those who don’t know struggle with all kinds of mental and emotional traumas, with few remedies other than iffy mental health therapies which often stretch over years and produce scant lasting results.
Rather than taking these wonderful gifts evidenced in people, places, objects and events, for granted, humans can use them for personal transformation. Done diligently, such transformation also transforms ordinary life into the Charmed Life I share with my clients.
Seeing Kimberly as a transformational opportunity also let’s her off the hook. She can be how she’s being and in the absence of me making her wrong, she becomes the angel she is, but only when I see her from my Inner Being perspective, my Broader Perspective which sees everything in reality as blessed, perfectly unfolding and beneficial to all the Universe.
Creating awesome from ordinary
The moment I tuned into my Inner Being, the discomfort, angst and resentment lifted. It was crazy how fast and complete it was! One moment it was there, the next POOF! Totally abscent.
What flowed in its place were thoughts about how wonderful this experience turned out to be, how good realizing that felt, and how remarkable I was as a deliberate creator creating this experience. I felt compelled to voice these thoughts:
Wow, I feel much better.
This is so much better than how I felt before.
Those old beliefs soothed in my awareness placed on more empowering thoughts.
I am having a good time creating a new reality with just my awareness.
I get that my reality is my creation, including other people in my reality.
Then I started thinking about the meal I’m preparing:
This meal is going to be really good!
The au gratin smells delicious!
So do the roasted veggies!
The stuffing is going to be good too!
Then came the extraordinary convergence of reality matching my new perspective: At that exact point in time, Kimberly came bounding down the stairs. I heard her walk into the kitchen from inside my basement space. Then she sent me a text:
Trippy! The very moment I tuned into these better-feeling thoughts, my experience of Kimberly shifted. A new reality showed up including a different Kimberly!
Nevertheless I wanted to amplify how good I felt. It felt so good. These thoughts flowed next…
That’s so cool what just happened.
I shifted my reality!
And my apparitions shifted too.
What I’m discovering is so accurate.
I love my Inner Being relationship!
I felt waaaay better by now.
In that moment I returned to my original bliss. I realized too my old beliefs transformed as well: I see them now as having created experiences long ago that, I was destined to shift, in my now, my current Thanksgiving; and in doing so transforming my past holiday experiences, my present one and all future ones.
I have wonderful new memories about the holidays. Memories made more powerful because they sprung from enlightened consciousness. I know thoughts born from enlightened consciousness are far more powerful than those born out of it.
I also now know that I’ve transformed past, present and future in one fell swoop. I know it because I feel it.
What does it feel like? It feels like Joyful invincibility.
The more I complain about the Present Moment while trying to change it, the more I energize what is, thereby keeping it in place. I give it more sticking power.
The same is true with trying to make something—presumably new and better than what is—happen. The harder I try, the more I energize the absence of the change I want to see. “The absence of the change I want to see” is the Present Moment, the “what is now” which doesn’t include what I want.
So the harder I try, the more the Present Moment recreates itself in my next now, and the next, and the next.
So profound is this secret, it is core to all master-level pursuits:
Auto racing: Indy car drivers are taught that if their car is out of control and they’re careening toward a wall, they should look in the direction they want to go, not the direction they’re going. From an edmunds.com article on advanced driving [Bracket statements added for clarity]:
“Avoiding accidents: Racing drivers know that if a car spins out in front of them [what is], it’s best to keep looking at where you want to go [what one wants], not at the car in front of you or even in the direction in which the car is already going [that’s momentum]. When you look in the right direction [look at what you want], the car goes in the right direction, a reminder of the way in which vision [desire] and car control [manifestation] are inextricably intertwined.”
Master-level martial arts: Every master-level martial artist knows resisting an attackers attack energizes the attack, making it more effective. The more you redirect attacker-energy in your favor, i.e. not resisting the attack, but flowing with it, the more powerful you become. Nearly all martial arts emphasize mastering this skill.
Personal survival: Riptides are dangerous. What makes them doubly so is if you try to fight your way out of it once you get caught in one. Swim against the force pulling you out and you’ll likely drown from exhaustion. I love this description from the website Art of Manliness:
Don’t try to swim against the rip. Deaths that result from riptides aren’t caused by the current pulling someone under; instead, the person typically panics, starts trying to swim against the rip to get back to shore, becomes exhausted, and drowns. An 8-feet-per-second riptide is so strong that not even Michael Phelps, even when he had that amazing mustache, could swim against it. Don’t kick against the pricks. Swim parallel to the shore. Instead of swimming against the rip current, you want to swim perpendicular to it, in either direction. Rip currents are typically only 20-100 feet wide. Once you leave the rip, swim at an angle away from it towards the shore. Go with the flow. If you don’t have the swimming skills or energy to swim out of the rip, float on your back and go with the current. Just imagine you’re taking a spin on the Lazy River at the water park you went to as a kid. Once the rip current dissipates, you can do the parallel swim thing or try to signal to the lifeguard or someone else that you’re in need of help.
See that part about “go with the flow”? Exactly.
So what does all this mean regarding creating my Charmed Life? Good question. And here’s where the secret waits patiently for discovery: Hold it lightly, my friends.
Here’s how I do it:
I pay no attention to the world around me if I feel resistance about it. What is, is what’s becoming. Focusing on what is only gives me more of that. Instead, I pay attention to the world I prefer seeing. When I do, I feel lighter, as I let go of stress I carry around being frustrated and angry about what I see on tv, read online or in print, or hear from well meaning friends.
I Create in my mind what I would prefer to have that would replace what is. I don’t worry about details. Instead I think about how that new world feels. Fun? Pleasurable? Interesting? Adventurous? Exciting? Then I hold this feeling as long as I can as often as I can throughout the week.
I hold lightly to those feelings, let them generate momentum. I’m light and easy about all this. I play around with the vision I created in the previous step. I let go of any thoughts of “making it happen” or “doing something in the world” that will lead to this vision. My holding onto this vision is more powerful than action because in the Moment of Becoming, what I want already has sufficient momentum to fulfill itself.
I’m open to inspiration. Successful with the above steps, I receive impulses that compel action. I follow that. See where it leads.
I do less, play more. I replace all that time I spend reading, talking, and thinking about what is with time spent having fun. I follow my passions, pursue a fun hobby, develop a new skill, meet new people, go out on walks—whatever is fun. These periods allow my mind and the Universe to collaborate, to create opportunities for me to discover pathways to the world I envisioned in step two.
These five steps contain the power of creation. In a little time I found not only pathways leading me to opportunities, people, events, and ideas that support creating the world I want to see, my life now is more fun, easier and lighter.
When all is said and done, what I want is that last part. I want my life to be fun, easy and light. Truth is, I can have that now, without anything changing in the world around me. But it is oh so much fun creating new realities, then seeing them come true.
I love what I know. I love how I feel. How I feel gets better with every breath. I love knowing the more I love how I feel, the more lovely feels become who I be.
And in that being, so must all my desires be. So they are. And the being I be expands my awareness so those fulfilled desires be in my beingness. In other words: life experience fills with fulfilled desires.
That’s good because it must be. And all that bes is good.
As I stand in my blessedness and worthiness I eagerly anticipate more evidence of my blessedness and worthiness. I know, I feel, I be. I be I do I have. And that includes my fulfilled desire.
The beliefs I hold are creating my reality. I am bridging those beliefs with beliefs that create more things in my reality that I want. I know what I’m believing by looking at what my now contains. For my now reflects back to me my beliefs. My current now can be bridged to a better now. I do that by thinking thoughts into beliefs representing what I want in my now: happiness, joy, fun and things that surprise and delight me. Be sure to watch with the sound on 😀
I enter heaven by feeling good, being happy and acknowledging when cool things happen in response. Cool things offered to me, by me, which tells me I have walked through the pearly gates. There, my Personal Trinity celebrates me. They celebrate my choices. Because my choices make All That Is more.
To me, heaven is not someplace I go when I die. After all, there is no such thing as death in the sense most people understand that word. Instead, heaven is a state of mind. It results as life shows me how much I am blessed. It results when I see and acknowledge all moments where my Personal Trinity showers me with what I want. I don’t see all those moments. I’m getting better at that though.
Never the less, when I do recognize every thing I want is coming to me, I get a wonderful feeling. That feeling tells me I’m connected to the best part of me. That larger part of me.
Connecting like that. That’s heaven. When I’m in that place, my world matches that state. So Earth for me becomes heavenly.
Today was that kind of day. I woke to satisfying, vivid adventures in my dream scape. After few moments of post-sleep focus, dream experiences feel as real as wake scape. I wake from my dreams feeling heavenly. I know that experience demonstrates my higher awareness kicked in. I know I can’t connect with that “other” reality so clearly if my awareness isn’t at a high level.
I did my usual morning routine. Then I meditated for 20 minutes. It was bliss. I found my center, something I love doing in meditation’s stillness. That amplified my already positive feelings. Through specific meditational processes, I re-enter the awareness state in which dreams occur. I know when I recall dreams this way while awake, I practice standing in that high awareness I’m in when dreaming. Only I’m not dreaming.
Being in that high awareness while awake is important. That state is the same unrestricted state which creates physical realities as delicious as dream state realities. Nightly dreams come for many reasons. One reason is through dream experiences, I learn how to hold that non-resistant state while awake.
This practice is how I become a master creator. I know the practice works because of what happens in dream scape. Re-presencing dreams in wake state tells me it’s working too. I also know it’s working because of how I feel. Finally, I know it’s working because of what happens in daily life.
Like what happened the rest of this day for example.
· · ·
So, feeling great, I got ready for an eight-hour shift at what I’m calling my “bridging job”.
My bridging job is what I’m doing while I sooth my beliefs about lack and scarcity. I’m replacing those with beliefs about plenty and abundance and possibility. And about not tying my financial abundance to action taken.
I know this is working because my days are getting better and better, week after week and month after month. How do I know they’re getting better? One, I keep a journal. Two, I see miracles – or rather what seem like miracles – happen more and more.
Only they’re not miracles. They’re not miracles because I know this is how life is supposed to be when I’m positively focused. Here are some of the things that happened the day I wrote this.
• A manager told me today that I am on a list of preferred employees at my “bridging job”. I’ve only been there two weeks. I know this indicates positive results of my focus. It also foretells more positive things experiences.
• My whole shift was fun and full of happy moments. I know these experiences should not be discounted. They are the stuff of what makes life heaven.
• When I checked in this morning, I was assigned a brand new, awesome Ram Van. It only had 48 miles on it. It had all the bells and whistles. My manager said don’t get attached to specific vans because we often trade vans once we get to our loading site. Today, she said we would switch as usual. But, when we got to the site, instead of switching vehicles, we moved our loads to the vehicles we already had. So I got to drive that van the whole shift. Awesome!
• Mid morning, I received an enormous indication. My trainee and I arrived at our first stop. We were looking for this one lobby where we would deliver a package for a customer, since he wasn’t home. My trainee found it. We were about to drive over there. It was quite a ways away. But just then, a guy parked right next to our van. He got out of his car. At that moment, as we were walking up to our van, I got an intuition our package belonged to this guy. The impulse to ask him was strong. So I asked him. He was the customer! So we gave him the package and avoided having to drive to the lobby. My trainee was stunned. “How did you know that was our customer?” he asked with a look on his face as though I had done some Jedi mind trick. I told him my intuition told me. I said I listen to my intuition all the time. I said I like writing about events just like this in my journal. When I do, I said, my intuition delivers more experiences just like this.
• Later, we had a package for a customer who didn’t leave us the code to get in the secured apartment lobby. As it happened, a FedEx delivery driver showed up at the front door just when we did. And, of course, he had the code. We all walked up together, chatting the whole way. It was a wonderful moment to share positive stories with each other!
I’ve written before that little things that happen that tell me bigger things are on the way. I know they are on the way, not only because of these little things that happen more often, but also because of how I feel. I know I want really big things. I also know my Personal Trinity is working behind the scenes creating my future now. A future now jam-packed with what I want.
And the more I do those things the clearer my dreams get. The clearer my dreams get, the more I match that clarity in my waking reality. The more I do that, the better my awareness becomes. And the more my awareness allows me to see little positive signs. Signs that my dreams, large and small, are becoming real.
As all thathappens I know I’m on the way to my biggest dreams of all.
It feels great being Positively Focused. I can’t think of any better way to live.
There is rancor in America and elsewhere. No time more than today is communication proficiency, self control, presence of mind and command of intention needed.
Also needed: compassion, honesty, openness and vulnerability.
When a human being is scared, they do and say irrational things. Scared people try controlling environmental factors by any means necessary. If they’re scared enough, they’ll get violent.
These acts are typical for any human. Not only conservatives. Progressives verge on similar insecurity-fueled irrationality. The Anti-facists are a great example.
But progressives have no basis for their fear. They are winning.
Conservatives have a LOT of basis for theirfear. A biological basis, as we pointed out here. The future – our collective future – offers lots too. It threatens everything they hold dear.
We therefore offer this guide to progressives. Progressives are best positioned to make history. Not by changing conservative minds. But by changing how they approachconservatives.
This guide presents a path forward. Life-changing, gratifying conversations with conservatives are possible. Conversations that can change opinions are too. These are sorely needed, but they’re not happening today’s social discourse. Not enough anyway.
This opinion-changing must happen on an individual-by-individual basis. Influence on such an insignificant level can change nations.
It’s amazing what happens when a person feels heard. It’s also amazing we get so many positive responses from conservatives, such as this one:
Progressives don’t need to change the world. They need to change their approach.
So what follows describes practical, sure-fire approaches. They will work.
However, you must practice them. Becoming genuinely proficient with them will transform your experience. Not only with your conservative fellow Americans, but anyone you disagree with.
But….and it’s a big one: if you’re not genuine in your desire to form real human bonds with a fellow human being; a human being you right now may consider your existential enemy, you will not get far. Your desire to connect with this other human must be sincere. These are not debating tactics.
Your Ground Rules
Before offering the approaches let’s set your ground rules. Your rules of engagement. Not engagement with the prospective conservative. We’ll talk about that later.
These rules of engagement are for how you will engage your humanity and your brain in service of your cause. Which is to connect meaningfully with a human you may currently consider your enemy and, through that connection, have an inspiring positive experience via conversation.
So here are your ground rules:
You will not allow words to trigger your well-honed sensitivity to offense. Words are just that. Words. You are not under threat. Even if a threat is offered, they are words. A real threat is immanent behavior likely resulting in serious personal injury. Not someone’s lips moving. Maintain your calm no matter what is said. Better yet, replace your sensitivity to offense with a healthy sense humor.
Your goal is connection. Not winning. You are not trying to persuade a conservative to become progressive. Conservatives serve a beneficial purpose within humanity. Your goal is connection. So you can fulfill your primary and secondary intents and commitments, outlined below.
Your primary intent/commitment is: understanding. You must be clear and rigid in your desire to hear, understand and inquire further into what the conservative believes.
Your secondary (but no less important) intent: finding commonalities between you and your conservative conversation partner.
Follow these ground rules while applying approaches described here. You’ll be stunned as you discover how human conservatives are. Your mind will expand and you’ll understand where conservatives are coming from.
You may even become genuinely compassionate towards conservatives. Rather than claiming to be compassionate while hating conservatives. Hate, annoyance, extreme frustration are not compassion. That’s hypocrisy. If you’re progressive.
Distinguishing The Context
Now let’s talk about context. To do so we’ll distinguishing two labels which describe communication between two people. People often confuse one for the other. Doing so, they get in trouble.
You want a conversation with the conservative. The word “conversation” may mean to you the same thing as “discussion”, the other word we’re going to clarify. But these words are NOT the same. They describe two totally different intents, processes, outcomes, contexts and feelings.
One aligns with your intent (presuming you’re wanting connection). The other does not.
You want conversation
“Conversation” is a talk, usually an informal one, between two or more people exchanging ideas. You know this. But you may not know the word’s origin. Words’ origins carry their meaning so much better sometimes than their definition. So let’s look at the origin of “conversation”. Here it is:
Interesting, eh? A conversation then, is something that ends with you having a feeling of “living among, or having intimate familiarity,” with the person with whom you have conversed. This is what you want. You want a conversation. Not a discussion.
Not a discussion
Let’s contrast conversation now with “discussion”. A discussion is “the action or process of talking about something in order to reach a decision or to exchange ideas.”
That sounds laudable. It’s not though.
Not in the context of making a connection with, and understanding another human being.
Discussions don’t breed familiarity. In discussions, you’re just throwing back and forth opinions. Discussions get you nowhere if you’re trying to connect.
But wait, there’s more.
People don’t generally understand what “discussion” connotes. Probably because, like “converstation”, they don’t understand the word’s origin. Here is the origin of the word “discussion”, the noun and verb so you get a clear picture.
So the intent of “discussions” is not to gain familiarity and a sense of living among the person you are speaking with. No. Its intent is “to examine by argument, to tear apart, shake or dash to pieces.”
Does that sound like the basis of connection?
We don’t think so either.
· · ·
Progressives and conservatives are not trying to connect. They are tearing each other apart. And the country along with them.
They are discussing. Not conversing.
If you want a groundbreaking interaction with a conservative, you’re going to have to move out of discussion mode and into conversation mode.
Ok?
The Right Way To Approach Conservatives
So here are the approaches. They only work if you stridently refuse to be baited. Strive instead for connection and understanding (your ground rules).
If you can’t stick to the ground rules, it’s best you first practice with someone who can role play a conservative until you get the hang of it.
The approach:
Ask more questions than sharing your opinion.
Express over and over your sincere desire to understand their point of view, not to exert yours, until they relent, i.e. realize you really do want to understand them.
Beseech your conservative to stick to answering your questions. If they avoid or refuse to answer your questions, keep (politely) redirecting the conversation back to your questions, or express vulnerability (we’ll offer an example in a moment) that may trigger them reciprocating.
When the conservative answers your question, offer sincere praise and appreciation. It is not standard practice for someone who is fearful and feeling defensive to answer a question, particularly one that demands they be vulnerable. Especially a question asked by someone the responder believes is the enemy of their values. So reward them for taking a risk.
When the person answers your question, and you have praised them, ask more questions. Offer limited information you may want to share. Instead, listen to the person’s answers.
When they answer, take in what they say. Chew on it, prepare a relevant response. Then offer the response in the form of a question or a polite rebuttal supported with examples.
If they ask a question, answer it. If you don’t have an answer, say so. Risk looking stupid. And if they call you stupid or a loser or whatever, remember ground rule number one.
Repeat these steps.
We’re not offering this in a vacuum. It has worked for Perry several times now to remarkable results. Not every time, but often enough to recommend them. We’re offering one complete example that happened on facebook. We’re offering this example because of the documented evidence. Anyone can look at it to see what happened.
Despite Perry misstepping in several moments, the conversation went quite well. Here’s an overview of it:
Perry offered the following Meme on his wall.
It’s inaccurate (which the conservative responders pointed out). But the purpose of sharing it was for conversation. Conversation did happen. It ended with the following statement. This from a conservative who at first expressed himself aggressively:
I enjoyed reading your post. We do have more in common it seems….I wish you much success in your endeavors!
This is where you want to end up. It won’t happen every time, but if you practice, you’ll get better at it. Perry screwed up in this facebook exchange a couple times. But he still ended with positive results in line with the above ground rules, objectives/intents.
So we know if you sincerely use these approaches, you’ll find yourself in a new reality. One where conservatives turn out to be human.
Just like you.
Don’t Get Triggered
A conservative defending her life-decisions, then name calling Perry in a tweet.
People who believe conservatively have been trained to be tough. They live in a brutish world where it’s dog eat dog, and survival of the fittest.
Their manner of interaction feels like discussion. Confrontational, gruff, belligerent. Not conversational. At first.
So be prepared for rebuffs, snide accusations, and direct insults. It will sound like you’re talking to Alex Jones, Donald Trump or Rush Limbaugh instead of the person you’re talking with.
After all, for many conservatives, these people are their heroes. So of course they will pattern their discussion style on those peoples’ styles.
Intelligent conservatives, taking a cue from many conservative activist organizational playbooks, such as the college campus-focused Turning Point USA, will try to bait you into losing your control.
Don’t take the bait.
Compassion Wins. Always.
Self control is your best friend. Again, if you suck at self control, your best fallback is your leftie compassion.
But if “compassion” is just a word for you, or worse, something you believe you “can’t afford in these times”, which is actually something a progressive told Perry recently, then you’ve already lost.
There is always room for compassion. The best, most effective progressives – Jesus, Ghandi, MLK, Harvey Milk – have demonstrated this time and time again.
You must contain your disgust. You must respond with vulnerability. Even in the face of their disgust of you (and what they presume you believe).
For example, when Perry clarified errors a conservative made in interpreting Perry’s previous comment, the person offered the following:
I’d like to continue proving my points but you don’t seem too receptive to the logic I’m providing. Your idea of what a necessity is leaves me wondering how much of a privileged life you must have and probably still do live. Many people survive without an education and many walk to jobs or bike. Many live healthy lives without doctors and hospitals. It’s a shame that you don’t seem to have facts to support your assertions, or did I miss them somewhere in your previous posts? Again I appreciate your ‘opinion’ and respectfully disagree with most if not all of them. Assertions without facts to support them lead me to believe that all of your points are opinion based.
In response, Perry could have been triggered as a person of color, being accused of enjoying privilege. Instead, Perry offered vulnerability. How? By acknowledging his privilege:
So now let’s talk about my privilege, which is a funny thing to bring up IMO. But as I said, I’m more than happy to chat about whatever you bring up.
I am privileged. I live in a great country. It has ALWAYS been great. It also can be improved. I live in the west. I live in a democratic society. I get to live pretty much wherever my finances make it possible to live. I have a wife who loves me, pets who adore me. I enjoy the sunshine, the beautiful state of Oregon and all it has to offer. I enjoy clean air, a healthy body and mind. I enjoy clean delicious food my wife makes for me or I make. I enjoy an adventurous life, where I get to spend my time doing pretty much whatever floats my boat. My life is getting better and better as is my prosperity. I realize my eternal nature and from that I know anything is possible.
I’m also male. I’m a “black” male. I came into the world with the perfect timing such that I can enjoy both these in relative security and comfort (compared to other times). I’m also non-binary. I’m free of constraints of being “straight” (thank god!). I have the fluidity of thought to see the world from multiple perspectives, and not just human ones. I have the privilege to have time to think about life – ordinary day-to-day life, but also extraordinary aspects of life, such as what happens after death and how all that happens after death (and before birth) shapes what happens between birth and death. I have found those answers. From those answers, I know things a LOT of people don’t know. So yeah, I’m privileged. But no more than anyone can be. I can pretty much do right now, whatever floats my boats.
It just so happens, what floats my boats is creating a world where EVERYONE has the opportunity to do whatever THEY want to float THEIR boats….
You can’t be vulnerable if you’re triggered. You can’t offer cogent thoughtful replies either when you’re triggered. When you get triggered, you offer fodder confirming conservative beliefs about you and other progressives (liberals). Don’t be this guy:
Offer Food For Thought
Once you have earned their attention by thoughtfully, calmly and constructively listening to, and then expressing understanding, only then should you offer “food for thought”.
Food for thought is not telling them they are wrong. This isn’t about right and wrong. Your food for thought should be an attempt to surface their human connection to other humans…even ones they believe aren’t worthy of that connection.
So for example, when a conservative says people who don’t work are parasites and deserve to starve, you must figure out a way to show how a person can do whatever he wants (even not work, for example) but shouldn’t have to starve. Or worse, work a job but not afford healthcare.
If you can’t do that, you have no basis for making such a claim. And a conservative will tell you.
Some conservatives (many people actually) view people negatively. Conservatives particularly believe people are lazy good-for-nuthins. People must earn their living by doing productive work, they believe. These beliefs aren’t factual. They’re conditioned or taught, which is exactly what a conservative told Perry recently:
…Maybe it’s because i’ve been conditioned to believe a certain way or possibly my life experience has taught me to be cautious….
A good way to chart unknown territory with a conservative: appeal to their well-known territory (for the conservative). That is, talk about liberty. But not the way conservatives talk about it.
Liberty as you may know, is a major conservative talking point. But the kind of liberty (aka “freedom”) conservatives believe in is a kind of pseudo-freedom. It’s not really freedom as it is based on coercion: As far as conservatives believe, your freedom doesn’t extend to being a lazy parasite on society. Another way of putting that is: your freedom shouldn’t cost me or anyone else. So pull your own weight.
The response to this point is: “you’re right. And in the 21st Century no one’s freedom should cost anyone anything. This is the future. Everything is possible.”
· · ·
Perry likes offering this tasty morsel, which creates amazing moments that, at first, stupefies conservatives. But then leads to remarkable, real, conversations.
It begins with Perry’s definition of real freedom:
“A person who is really free can do nothing if that’s what they want to do. A person who wants to spend all their time learning to paint, play video games all day, or fish or whatever, can. And they can do those things (or anything else) without going hungry, living on the street, or getting care for their body (or mind) if necessary. If they’re free that is. They can also get all the education they need or want to learn or improve any skill while doing whatever they want without having to earn money to get those things. And…the person exercising their freedom can do so without anyone else having to do anything they don’t want to do to support that person.”
A definition like that will short circuit most people’s brains (conservative and progressive) namely because most people can’t figure out how this kind of freedom is possible. Perry explains how this is possible. Then shows how the world is careening towards exactly that outcome for everyone.
Your food for thought, therefore, must halt a conservative’s talking points in its tracks. It must get them genuinely thinking. Not spouting conservative boilerplate.
Another example: Perry was at a Starbucks recently. There he happened to sit in a nest of conservatives. That wasn’t his intent. It just happened.
One of the conservative’s asked “what do you do for a living?”
“I don’t do anything for a living,” Perry said. “I don’t believe my living requires me to do anything.”
This conservative’s friend, Mary, piped in.
“So you’re a socialist,” She said.
“No. I’m not,” Perry said.
“Then what are you?” Mary asked.
Knowing Mary was likely a conservative, and therefore Christian (which she was) Perry said “I am what Jesus is.”
That derailed Mary’s train of thought. Now Mary had to ask a question likely not included in her talking points:
“What do you mean?” She asked.
“I am that I am,” Perry said.
The conversation turned to Christianity. Perry is not Christian, but he is well-versed on fundamental accuracies upon which Christianity’s distortions are based.
So he was able to form a connection with Mary through her religious beliefs. Then he turned the conversation towards Christian compassion. He was about to ask Mary if her compassion extends to immigrants and if not why not.
But Mary ran out of time (she had to catch a plane).
Still, you can see, by not getting baited into a debate about “socialism” and name calling, and instead connecting with something Mary held dear (her Christian beliefs), Perry found room in between Mary’s boilerplate about people who she prejudges as “socialists”.
You can do this too.
And not only will the conversations you have stun you in their originality, you’ll learn that underneath all that lashing out, anger and conservative closed-mindedness is a human being wanting to be understood and connected with.
That is the short answer to this entire approach. Giving conservatives what they want, so their minds open.
· · ·
If progressives really want the world they want, they must find a way to give conservatives what they want.
Until you know what that is, you can’t give it to them. And you can’t know unless you understand them. And, you can’t understand them unless you’re willing to talk with them.
And finally, if your approach is based on not understanding justified conservative fear that they’re losing everything, and that’s why they are lashing out, you’re going to have a hard time having a conversation with them.
Rancor in America and elsewhere can be mended. But you can’t expect conservatives to make the first step.
Someone has to though. That someone can be you. And this guide can help.
