Fringe Things I’m Into That Could Go Mainstream One Day (Part 1)
Fringe Things I’m Into That Could Go Mainstream One Day (Part 1)
These things that have made my life better may one day just become a thing
If you like my writing, feel free to click the ❤️ or 🔄 button on this post so more people can discover it on Substack 🙏
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
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.
Energetic Testing
Part of the challenge with energy medicine is the availability of instruments we have to measure these things. We live in a society where sometimes it feels like people care more about quantification than whether it just works. At the commercial level, the only diagnostic tool I have worked with that attempts to measure the energetic profile of systems in the body is the acugraph which is very acupuncture centric.
An inner technology that I strongly believe in is muscle testing. Like most fringe ideas which people have not experienced directly, many roll their eyes at muscle testing dismissing it as some woo-woo thing.
The main idea with muscle testing is that our nervous system is a gateway to retrieving information from the broader field of consciousness. With practice, we can learn to tap into this body of intelligence in order to ascertain information from the field in a way that bypasses our conditioned, survival mind. My sense is that the traditional system hates this idea because it's free and available to every human who simply invests in learning how to do it.
I used to be a skeptic, but became a believe after it helped me identify a parasite that a sciencey stool test completely missed. This pushed me to learn how to tap into this intelligence in my own body. I tried many different methodologies and refined my acuity until I found something that consistently worked for me.
I then began to use muscle testing protocols to test many things from the efficacy of foods and supplements, to hidden emotions that lay dormant in my subconscious working with systems like the emotion code. Some people like David Hawkins believe you can even use muscle testing to test the integrity of any information and quantify spiritual evolution. At this point, I mostly use it to understand the energetic profile of things I put into my body.
I am constantly having my mind blown by what I learn about food and supplements with muscle testing. Some of the top products on Amazon and most well-respected “healthy brands” test like absolute shit.
As the world gets more and more difficult to make sense of and discern what is truly supportive of our being, I consider inner technologies that provide information in opaque situations to be infinitely valuable.
There are some devices that more or less attempt to mimic muscle testing by tuning into the broader field of information such as the acmos lecher antenna. I found it less intuitive than simply using my own body, but some people I know have had tremendous success with alternative medical practices that use it. I have also heard from friends some incredible things about the SCIO machine which also uses information from the broader field of consciousness as the basis for diagnosis. I have yet to try it, but would love to.
Energy workers
One thing that has been immensely helpful in navigating my own shifts is working with energy workers. It feels like my spiritual ambition at one point had me trying every type of modality I could find in Austin. If you live in ATX, I have an entire spreadsheet of the best people I found so just hit me up!
What I’ve come to learn is that it’s usually less about the modality and more about the skill of the practitioner. The best bodyworkers and healers tend to be highly intuitive/connected and blend a mix of modalities. Right now it takes a lot of guesswork to find amazing people. It’s usually done entirely through word of mouth and oftentimes people are so unfamiliar with this field that they will tell you someone is amazing when they’re really average because they haven’t had a ton of exposure.
Between great practitioners being in short supply and the difficulty in finding them, I think there is an opportunity to increase the supply of skilled professionals in these modalities and make discovery much easier. I am invested in a company in this space and excited to see where it goes.
Energetic Protection / Connectivity
You often hear people talk a lot about how humans weren’t designed to live in our current environment. I agree! I think many people view this from a perspective that does not acknowledge fails to recognize the underlying energetic lens.
If we can agree that the most fundamental component of everything is energy, we can start to open to the idea that we live in a world of vibrating energies. Nature and the earth have coherent frequencies that nourish life. We don’t just feel amazing in nature because trees are pretty and we’re off our phones. It’s also because we’re being immersed in healing energies aligned with our natural state.
Many of the most powerful technologies we have invented take advantage of information being transported through the broader energy field. It’s how we can text friends and go on the internet. However, with the convenience of all these technologies, there also has been the introduction of many incoherent, scattershot frequencies relative to the natural ones we were designed to live in. Artificial energy waves from wifi, electricity, and bluetooth, are problematic because our systems are getting bombarded by frequencies that they have not been designed for or well adapted to.
The downstream effects of this have been shown in many studies that point to scary side effects in animals from way less powerful technologies than we expose ourselves to on a daily basis. Obviously, big companies with profit motives have a vested interest in burying this information while thwarting further research and publicity.
With this in mind, any intervention that moves us more closely to the natural energetic environments our bodies have been experiencing for the majority of our humanhood improves our well-being. This includes things that protect us from unnatural energies such as EMF-blocking technologies like my Faraday canopy, EMF-blocking paint, dirty electricity boxes, hardwiring your home, and limiting phone use to when you need it. There are also products like Blushield which try to solve the problem by creating devices that amplify more powerful frequencies which mirror nature in order to override the incoherent ones created by our devices.
There’s also a free intervention of moving to more remote places with less EMF emissions! The Greater Austin Area has over 60 5G towers compared to places like Bend Oregon (1), Lisbon (3), and Costa Rica (0) according to this Ookala 5G map.
People need help here and we are starting to see companies pop up which provide diagnostics and interventions in your home like Shielded Healing who I worked with to mitigate impacts at my home. More of these companies will pop up and their biggest challenge will be education. The data is right out in the open on how these things harm us, but people will likely have a hard time swallowing that this goes against the narrative they’ve been fed. You haven’t read it in the mainstream news because people who have financial incentives with advertisers won’t touch it. For more information that points to the pervasion of electricity and the onset of many diseases, I recommend reading The Invisible Rainbow.
Not all energy emitted from our environment is bad. There’s also the good stuff that comes from the earth which is like a giant battery for our energy fields. The more we can be in nature and have our bodies in contact with the earth through grounding, water immersion, or even things like gardening, the more we can be nourished at the energetic level. This documentary on Earthing is fun to watch and provides the research available on how simple things like walking barefoot combats inflammation.
A big area of innovation in my opinion is footwear. I own a pair of grounders that use a conductive strip in the sole in order to provide similar benefits to being barefoot, but they’re pretty crappy and uncomfortable. I’d love to see footwear designed to provide connectivity to the earth’s energies that are stylish and functional. If someone can design a pair of Sabah’s that connect to the earth, I will be your first customer!
Detoxification
Our bodies are healing machines!
Every day the body’s profound intelligence makes use of that which sustains us while discarding anything that’s harmful to the best of its ability.
Unfortunately, there are now more harmful things in our environment and foods than ever before. There’s toxins in our foods, air, water, and energetic fields! I had a long conversation with Justin Mares about this on my podcast. Some of the stats discussed are mind blowing:
According to the American Lung Association's 2020 "State of the Air" report, nearly half of all Americans—more than 150 million people or ⅓ of American—were living in areas with unhealthy air quality levels. (source)
85% of the pesticides we use in the U.S. for growing food (including organic) are illegal in Europe, South America, and other places (source)
93% of streams, rivers and lakes in the US had some sort of like microplastic contamination in them (source)
As of 2020, it was estimated that about half a million U.S. children aged 1-5 had blood lead levels higher than 5 micrograms per deciliter, the reference level at which CDC recommends public health actions be initiated. (source)
It’s no wonder we are in a major health crisis where 6 out of 10 Americans have a chronic disease. It is a total dog fight to be healthy in the U.S. right now with Chronic disease rates up 700% since 1935.
I think for most people moving off the grid and starting a farm is probably unfeasible, though this is definitely becoming more in vogue amongst people with means. Instead, I think the name of the game will be lifestyle design interventions to mitigate environmental toxins the best we can while taking steps to become professional detoxers.
Similar to Shielded Healing, I think there will be companies built that advise people on detoxification interventions across their homes, foods, and lifestyles. These will be service businesses that probably develop their own interventions. We’ll also see an increase in practices that groove the natural detoxing channels like saunas which continue to grow in popularity.
Detox testing will become more important. Right now there’s a bunch of tests you can get that tell you your Toxin load across heavy metals, environmental toxins, mold, and chemical sensitivities. These are more lagging indicator tests. The only leading indicator test that I know of which attempts to measure the performance of the liver’s detox ability is The Hepatic Detox Profile. I have not done it.
I’ve been working with someone who uses energetic testing to understand what’s happening in the systems of the body which are hard to test like detox capacity with our current tools. There are many biological systems and processes that we just can’t measure holistically with the available instruments (i.e. digestion, lymphatic system, the entire energy system).
One thing he has taught me that seems to be proving true in my experience is that the body is like an intelligent machine with a sequenced order of operations. Oftentimes, it cannot perform jobs to be done like full detoxification because other more pressing jobs require its focus. This means you could be going to the sauna every day, hydrating like crazy, supplementing with charcoal, and only be getting a fraction of the benefit because the body is not primed for detoxification.
I think as detox becomes more of an imperative, we’ll start to see a greater interest in tests that understand how our detox capacity is performing and even things like what processes our body is prioritizing.
The interventions that will be the most interesting will be the ones that have a big impact with minimal displacement. Relative to relocation, high bang for your buck examples in my opinion include things like filtering all the water in your house, sleeping in a Faraday canopy, and devices like the Blushield. These 80-20 type solutions won’t completely absolve you of environmental toxins, but have a high upside without requiring you to make huge sweeping changes in your life.
This simple chart can be an easy way to vet business ideas in the space.
Part 2 Coming Soon
Everything shared above has become a big part of my experience because the interventions and shifts in thinking resulted positive impacts on my life. As as I’ve explored these interests, I’ve met many others with their own versions of a similar story that has led me to believe that I’m not alone.
In part two, I’ll share some more fringe things I’m into that may be ripe for the mainstream.
Part 2:
Subconscious / Emotional Purification
The body as a Communication Instrument of Consciousness
Non-drug Induced Altered States
Extra Sensory Perceptions and Abilities
Consciousness In the Workplace
Food and Water
Plant Consciousness
Minerals
Water Quality Awareness
Aligned Physical Communities
I love advancing things that I am passionate about and have been creating / tinkering with various things in these spaces. I’ve also made some investments.
If you know of anything cool related to the thoughts shared above, please let me know in the comments! If you’re working on something related, I’m also open to connecting with people to explore potential collaborations. Feel free to email me or ping me on twitter.
(warning: I'm having a baby any day now so no guarantees I will be able to get back anytime soon!)
You can check out part 2 here.
If you like my writing, feel free to click the ❤️ or 🔄 button on this post so more people can discover it on Substack 🙏
If you're interested in the inclusion of subtle energy in healthcare, Dr. Anoop Kumar who wrote a book called "Michelangelo's Medicine" is another good resource.
Love this, thanks Scott! I’ve always felt in tune with energy. I just didn’t have the language to express all these things until now. The Google gods image was an eye opener, it’s not just me and my small group of Aussie friends experiencing some form of ‘waking up’.
Also looking forward to looking more into muscle testing after a bad bout of health. Haven’t had much success with classic doctors and I have a feeling the answers may lay somewhere else... Gonna go grab something from David Hawkins! Thanks for the recommendation!