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I’ve had many people share with me that I’m often interested in obscure ideas and practices before they become “a thing.”
A few examples of things I became deeply immersed in 3-5 years before they blew up and category-defining companies emerged around them include:
meditation (2013)
intermittent fasting (2013)
regular bio-marker testing to support custom health protocols (2013)
podcasting (2013)
testosterone optimization (2014)
measuring HRV (2015)
messaging first business applications Troops (2015)
breathwork (2018)
Categorically, most of these interests are related to human performance or potential. I’ve also went deep on many things on that never seemed to break into the mainstream such as red light therapy, sound based nervous system entrainment, and combining physical exercise and mental reprogramming to name a few.
I recently was chatting with a venture capitalist and he asked me all the weird things I’m into now. I thought it might be a fun opportunity to share them and why I think they might become more broadly adopted.
Many of the things I share here are probably things a lot of people are skeptical of. At one point, I was likely a skeptic too! I just try to maintain a very open mind while trying things out to arrive at my own truth.
I support and believe in all of these things I’m about to share because I’ve tried them and they made my life better. These experiences pushed me to learn more about each subject matter.
This ended up being a long list which is why I am breaking this post into two parts.
Here is a table of contents for this article and part 2 which will be released later this week.
Part 1:
Part 2:
If you’re new here, make sure to check out part 2 which is a separate post!
All Things Energetics
I became interested in working with energy as a necessity. In 2019, my kundalini process began which started to make me incredibly aware of and sensitive to energy. This pushed me to learn and experiment with all sorts of practices and ideas to understand what was happening to me and discover my own truth.
Now I kind of view the world from an energy-first perspective.
What do I mean by this? I believe that all things are made of energy including matter, thoughts, emotions, and ideas. Energy and information are interchangeable. The same applies to matter and energy.
You may be looking at your hand saying “but this is solid!" How is this energy?”
A simple way to wrap your head around this idea is that matter is made up of atoms. If you take a microscope to zoom into atoms, you’d see 99.99% space and subatomic particles. If you continue to zoom in, you’d see that these particles are actually energy vibrating. This is why scientists measure these particles in energy units.
To the naked eye, we can’t see any of this because it is so infinitesimally small, but this is what is actually going on. So instead of a bag of meat, you can think of yourself and everything you see as composites of tiny vibrating energies.
There are many tailwinds that are moving us to a world that moves beyond purely the surface physicalist paradigm and starts to recognize & prioritize energy as the more fundamental substrate. Mystics and ancient traditions have posited the notion that energy is the more fundamental layer of reality for ages and now breakthroughs in quantum physics are building strong evidence for it.
At a more tangible level, many more people are engaging in contemplative practices that allow them to directly experience energy. It seems like an increasing number of these people are having bigger realizations around their true nature.
This bodes well for the recognition of energy because usually all major spiritual awakening/advancement is accompanied by an energetic shift at some point in the process. I’ve found this to be true despite the fact that some traditions highlight energy more than others. For example, you’ll probably hear many non-dual teachers talk less about energy relative to traditions like Daoism or RenXue which directly incorporate a theory of Qi into the teachings. It should be noted that some people experience a more pronounced shift in energy more than others. That doesn’t mean it doesn’t happen, it’s just less intense for whatever reason. I discussed this in my podcast with Angelo Dilullo.
Because more people are directly experiencing these things, I suspect this will necessitate more tools and education in the very broad realm of energetics.
Here are some areas of interest I expect to become more popular:
Direct Energetic Practices
Most contemplative practices have some activating energy component, but certain practices are more explicit about working with energy. For example, meditation and breathwork (pranayama) are very energetically activating which starts to move things in your consciousness. This is the mechanism that brings information like repressed emotions into your awareness. Though this dynamic exists, you might not hear the words like qi, prana, or life force commonly referenced with these practices in western culture.
Qigong and Tai Chi are examples of practices that are explicit about working with subtle energies. I started to practice Qigong in 2019 and was amazed at how I could feel the energy moving in my body. Over time it helped me with many health symptoms and eventually served as a gateway to understanding many innate human capacities I was previously unaware of. These were primarily related to directing subtle energy in and outside the body through intention (mind).
Today most people bucket these practices as merely alternatives to meditation positioning them as “moving meditation”. It is true that they can help drop you into a state of presence like meditation, however learning to work with the subtle energies is a very different skill and experience. For non-meditators, these practices are an interesting access point for greater well-being, while for meditators, they represent a new frontier to expand human potential.
Inclusion Of Energy in Healthcare
The Western medical system is mostly focused on the gross physical body. It’s my experience that this is one component of health which in many cases is downstream of what is happening energetically. People talk about mind-body connections all the time, but many people fail to realize that packets of information from the mind (thoughts, emotions, memories etc) are really just energy.
There’s lots of different debates about the exact mechanics of this. My sense is that information comes into the awareness which can stimulate an emotion. This emotional energy can pass through or stagnate based on our ability to process it. If we are able to experience the emotion fully, there is a minimal to non-existent signature left in our field. If we do not allow ourselves to experience the energy, it stagnates creating an imprint in our field which can block the flow of life force which sustains us. The last place the energy materializes downstream from this is the physical body which is the densest form of energy.
Despite the described ordering, traditional western medicine treats the physical body as the primary ground for intervention.
For example, your physical body may be malfunctioning due to the lack of flow of life force energy. The block may have been created due to an unfelt emotion from your adolescence. Instead of working on both the energetic and physical levels, the focus in western medicine is on mitigating the physical symptomology. As a result, the symptoms may get better temporarily only to return again in the same or another form. John Sarno does a masterful job talking about this moving systems dynamic in his books Healing Back Pain and The Divided Mind.
I’m not advocating for an either/or treatment protocol here, but for a more encompassing approach that works at all levels including what is often the root: the energy-information in the consciousness.
This isn’t to discount structural injury or chemical imbalances (i.e. ingesting toxins), but rather to acknowledge a host of malfunctions that originate in a realm that is tradditionally unseen and unacknowledged by Western medicine. More ancient medicinal systems such as Chinese and Ayurvedic medicine, both which are 1000’s of years old vs. 100’s of years old, more prominently acknowledge these components.
Today the problem isn’t that we don’t have ways to work on trauma and repressed emotions. It’s just that it is very disconnected from traditional healthcare and the conversation around how it impacts the physical body. There are some great Doctors out there who are advocating for a more encompassing approach such as Dr. Lucy McBride with her 4 L’s framework, but it feels like she is in the minority.
There are many forms of direct energy medicine that I have tried. This includes acupuncture, ayurveda, various forms of trauma work, reiki, energy healers, somatics, qigong…my wallet can prove it!
In my experience, the most promising forms of these practices are ones where the practitioner is able to communicate directly with the body to understand what is going on in order to create tailored interventions vs. a more shotgun approach. This all comes down to the skill of the healer and/or the nature of the modality. For example, you may go into a run of the mill acupuncture place and they ask you what’s wrong, then drop needles into your arm. My experience is that if this practitioner is not working intuitively by getting information from my body, the outcome is usually not as good. More tailored examples would be an intuitive energy worker who tunes in order to get information when you lay on their table. I’ve also tried some forms of bioenergetic medicine where you measure the frequency of the organs and systems in the body. You use these measures as a diagnostic to interpret how to treat the body with supplementation, foods, emotional healing work, and lifestyle decisions.
I have worked directly with many of these practices that work at the energy level and their efficacy is very real. Look no further than the countless people who have only found healing once they opened up to something outside of Western medicine for evidence.