Part 2: Fringe Things That I'm Into That Could Go Mainstream

More unconventional interests and beliefs that could represent the future

If you like my writing, feel free to click the ❤️ or 🔄 button on this post so more people can discover it on Substack 🙏

In part 1 of this post, I talked about fringe interests I have in the world of energy and detoxification. These spaces are definitely on many people’s radar, but in terms of depth and breadth amongst the general U.S. population, it still feels like early innings to me.

In this post, we’re going to expand on some additional personal interests that have not cracked the mainstream.

You’ll notice that there’s a lot of overlap in all these topics. Many of these these interests work together in the context of improved well-being and consciousness expansion.

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 

Let’s dive in! And if you haven’t checked out part 1 yet, you can do that here.

Subconscious / Emotional Purification 

Whether we want to be happier or healthier, all roads point to working on our consciousness.

Our personal histories and the ideas we’ve been exposed serve as backdrop for the creation of our thoughts, emotions, automatic compulsions (patterns), and potentially even the underpinnings of physical reality. Understanding how to excavate and reshape this subconscious inner territory has been the most enriching pursuit of the last 5 years of my life. 

I’ve tried many different modalities that all point to 3 main focus areas: processing emotions, transforming patterns, and changing beliefs/concepts.

Emotions

Unprocessed emotions can wreak havoc on our lives. I never knew I was emotionally bypassing until I started working on my awareness. It became clear that so much of the garbage in my mind and eventually difficulty in my body all came back to emotional wounds that I was unknowingly carrying from just being.

One example was my anger. Somewhere in my upbringing I picked up the concept that anger was bad. If you were angry, it meant you were unadjusted and ungrateful. So I unconsciously developed a habit to bypass anger. Over the years this compounded without me realizing it. It would manifest more subtly as a general impatience and hyper-vigilance that pervaded all areas of life. Sometimes I’d feel like an instapot ready for steam to explore out of me when things didn’t go my way. The only times this would actually ever surface would be in environments that didn’t risk my social positionality like with my immediate family and girlfriend.

Emotional suppression also manifested in all sorts of ways in my body. I became incredibly tight. I lost my deep belly laugh. I started to have random health difficulties emerge such as digestion challenges despite a decade of maintaining a huberman-like exercise and diet regimen. 

As I started to process many emotions I’d been carrying since I was a kid, I started to feel lighter both mentally and physically. Eventually, all the energy that had been resourced around keeping these emotions at bay could be redirected to higher purposes such as the creative intelligence of intuition which I now just see as a direct connection to Source. I even started to notice changes in my physicality as all the tightness released like getting my dimples back!

Patterns

Patterns are the compulsive, automatic responses that are generated from the imprints of life. The energy behind these mental constructs hijack our awareness and take us out of identifying as a loving awareness.

Ever feel blissed out from yoga or a meditation session, only to be triggered 20 minutes later by some inconsequential detail? This is because the events of life collided with some pattern in your consciousness.

Patterns impact our thoughts, interpretation of the world, and actions we take. These subtle forces can often be the drivers of our lives, yet until a certain depth of awareness is reached, you probably don’t know it. At least I didn’t. I think most humans have 100’s if not 1000’s of them.

An example pattern is the mental formation of “I’m not enough.” I’ve written about this before, but this idea was responsible for decades of intense ambition in my life. As far as I can tell, the imprint occurred when I was 5 years old due to a bully on my bus. It was then reinforced over many years by the events of life. 

The easiest way I’ve found to discover your patterns, is to notice when you are disturbed or resisting anything. This is a pointing to a pattern which you can use processes like these to transform. The more I have been able to unbound the energy and install new information to reflect the natural state, the more I am able to rest as the loving awareness regardless of what life throws at me. It’s my observation that as we increasingly stabilize this state of being, the greater understanding and wisdom we receive.

Changing/Beliefs and Concepts

I think of our consciousness as just a massive information store. The contents of the information store drive our response to reality and what increasingly feels like the content of reality itself. 

When I began to do this work, I realized I had unknowingly absorbed lots of unsupportive concepts. I remember one day realizing, “wow I’m just a ball of ideas and most of them are shitty.”

It became clear that the information in my consciousness was informing my meaning making of reality, life strategies, and self perceptions. For example, I noticed the idea of needing to grind to make a lot of money. Is this fundamentally true? No. It may be a common pattern and societal narrative, but there are obviously exceptions to the rule. What if this concept was erased and replaced with something like all the resources I need flow to me with ease? The more I worked on my awareness and deprogramming myself, the more I began to see how all these inherited concepts were driving my reality.

I also started to see how much this was impacting my health. I began to realize how my body was just an order taker from this information store like a robot. If we think something is bad for us, the body will respond in concert whether it is sun exposure, certain foods, etc. I know this is a jarring idea for some to get behind, but you can start to see beginnings of a deeper truth looking at the nocebo and placebo effects.

Obviously there are many biological processes and reactions that run without any information we’ve been exposed too. So I think it’s fair to say that the concepts in our consciousness have a major impact, but may not be the whole story when it comes to impacts on the physical body.

So does this mean you can just start doing whatever the hell you want with no consequences? No. My experience is that you’re kind of subject to the rules of the information in your consciousness which you may not even be aware of. So it’s not like someone can read this when they are identified as a mind-body with all their programs and just start being lazy hoping to effortlessly achieve wealth or eat like shit while maintaining perfect health. It doesn’t work that way.

It seems like the depth of awareness and our ability to locate the information and transform it dictates the level of agency we have here. This is how many yogis reportedly live off mostly breath, barely slept, and perform other feats deemed impossible according to “the rules”. They broke free of the limitations of the traditional humanhood narrative by shifting their identification and information in their consciousness. David Hawkins talks a lot about this in the context of health in his books.

For us non-saints, the challenge we face is that so much of what we have been conditioned to believe are concepts outside of our immediate awareness. This includes everything from ideas we have heard from authority figures as kids, big T and little t trauma, and cultural rhetoric. 

The Work

The way we can create more agency in our lives is by working on our awareness so that we can begin to investigate, purify and reconstruct the information in our consciousness whether it’s unprocessed emotions, unsupportive patterns, or shitty concepts. There are many, many ways to do this and this process is a life-long endeavor.

A few fields that approach this from different entry points include:

• The continued growth of contemplative practices like meditation, yoga, qigong, and anything that creates space between thoughts and awareness

• Somatics - focuses information stored in the body

• Emotional awareness and healing - i.e. Internal Family Systems, Emotion code, TRE, Patterns Work, Emotional Inquiry

• Psycho-somatic health - the integration of what is going on in the psyche with our body

I think to really make progress here most people will need to take a multi-pronged approach, trying different things to see what works. I see all these modalities as tools that I can use and discard as I need depending upon whatever the emerging inner landscape calls for. 

There is so much here and it feels like we are just scratching the surface as a broader society. I think anything effective in this broader space is poised to grow as many people are completely unaware of this work or just scratching the surface.

One thing I think a lot of people do not understand about spirituality is that in the pursuit of Divine union, the practical reconstruction of the consciousness is an inevitable byproduct. In this way, spirituality could be the healthiest, most liberating thing you could ever invest in. At least that is what I think.

The Body As A Reflection and Communication Instrument of Consciousness

Building upon everything in the part 1 on energy, healthcare, and the last section, one idea I have become a believer in is that the body is a manifestation of your consciousness. 

Many things in our experience are totalities of consciousness. A totality means that something is simultaneously contained in an object while also being an expression of the whole thing. This is also part of the holographic principle where each part of a hologram contains the entirety of the hologram in itself.

A cool medicinal system that exemplifies this is Iridology which believes the patterns of your eyes express what is happening within your entire system. Some people believe the entire universe can be found in a single cell and vice versa.

Viewing the body as a reflection of consciousness means that when there is a malfunction in your system, the symptomatology may be pointing us to investigate something in your life or subconscious. I love this quote which captures this succinctly:

Our biography creates our biology

Let me be clear, for most people there are obviously some malfunctions in cellular health that occur in the physical body due to exposure/ingestion of toxins, nutritional deficiency, and physical injury. All I’m saying is there that is also more to the story and many ailments are rooted in something else.

When you set the strong intention to evolve your consciousness and start to view the body as almost a communication mechanism to go inward in order to heal and transform what keeps you in separation, an interesting shift happens; you begin to see that perhaps the highest objective of the body is to actually wake you up and bring you back to the realization of your divine nature. Maybe at a certain point it helped you get a six pack and girlfriend, but there is actually a much deeper purpose to why we’re here and what our bodies are for beyond having cool experiences.

There are components of this idea found in ancient medicine systems. For example, in Chinese medicine and Ayurveda, certain organs are associated with different emotions. So if our liver is malfunctioning, perhaps we need to investigate some anger we are holding.

I didn’t go seek out this belief. I came to it through my own healing experience when nothing else worked. Despite leading a pristine lifestyle for a lot of my life, I have gone through a ton of health shit in recent years. Most people would point to this as an example of why I am so off on all of this.

I used to wonder if something was wrong with me incessantly going to Dr.’s to try and fix myself I eventually learned that the experience of having an onslaught of health difficulties is actually quite common for people who have a rapid spiritual transformation, especially in the kundalini process. You are basically undergoing a massive purification process which happens both energetically and physically. The old system must be broken down and cleansed in order for a new one to get rebuilt. This may not happen to everyone, but it certainly happened to me.

What has been so interesting to me is how tightly many major revelations and emotional releases have occurred in concert with changes to symptomatology. A very simple example is this time I had a lingering laryngitis. At the onset, I went to an ENT and did everything they told me. I then went to a gastroenterologist because after failing to heal me, the ENT told me my throat discomfort was from GERD. I then did everything the gastro told me including cutting out coffee, alcohol, and anything acidic. Still unsuccessful, I went to additional doctors in both specialties trying all kinds of diets such as low-FODMAP, low histamine, carnivore, etc. This occurred over 6 month span. At one point, it got so bad that I had to see a speech pathologist because I was having trouble speaking.

One day a friend of mine asked me what was happening in my life when this all began. I looked at my calendar and remembered I was in New York City. I realized that during that trip I had told a lie to someone I was dating at the time that I felt really guilty about.

I decided to meditate and try to be with that feeling. During this session, I processed the guilt and forgave myself. The next day my throat felt normal again. After 6 months of throwing the medical intervention kitchen sink unsuccessfully, it was the recognition of the dishonesty and guilt that immediately healed that ailment.  

This instance is just one of MANY examples that I have experienced that made it evident how consciousness was the primary mechanism driving the body. I am not the only person that has tuned into this phenomenon. Everyone from world-class scientists like Candace Pert and Bruce Lipton, to more emergent authors like Joe Dispenza and Gabor Mate are shouting from the rooftops about the mind-body connection.

Right now relatively few people are out there claiming that your physical ailments are actually primarily healing opportunities serving your evolution. The whole field of understanding is scattered and feels disorganized.

I think there will be more people who create very specific programs for people to make the connection between consciousness and targeted healing. Two books I have experimented with that attempt this are The Encyclopedia of Ailments and Diseases: How to Heal the Conflicted Feelings, Emotions, and Thoughts at the Root of Illness and Recall Healing’s Pyramid of Health. Books are not enough. I think we need practitioners and digitally native delivery methods to help people navigate these waters.

I hope people have an easier time than I did figuring all this out. Simultaneously, I know I also had to go through this in order to be able to serve in the way I am today.

Non-drug Induced Altered States

Some people think that psychedelics are a panacea of answers to all our problems. There’s no doubt that they can be very powerful agents to achieving altered states which can result in improved mental health, physical healing, creative breakthroughs, & spiritual connectedness.

However, there are many under-discussed downsides to psychedelics which I have experienced directly that make alternatives access points to similar states attractive. One downside is that they can overextend participants into energetic or psychological experiences that they are not physically, mentally, or energetically prepared for. My own 4+ year ongoing kundalini process that was unexpectedly initiated by ayahuasca is a perfect example of this. I went in looking for creative ideas for my business and left trying to figure out what the hell was happening to my body. I am grateful for it, but it has been excruciatingly grueling and I do not advise anyone to seek this experience out. 

Certain psychedelics can be very hard on our bodies to process, even creating toxicity. I have also experienced this directly. I’m not saying that it’s not worth the price, but it’d be great to have the upside without this potential side effect. Lastly, most are not legal right now!

I know there are lots of people working to improve these conditions in the psychedelic field, but this all points me toward the importance of making these type of experiences more accessible without the substances. 

There are many different startups doing cool things to enhance altered states across breathwork, meditation, dreams, prayer, & light & sound. 

One of my personal favorites is sound. Sound is exciting because it's so accessible. Relative to things like meditation, everyone can be somewhere and listen to something. In 2018, I discovered Nucalm and started to deeply investigate cymatics and entrainment technologies. I frankly haven’t seen a ton of innovation in the space, but I’m optimistic about what Opus is doing with  their sound bed. I think we’ll see more technologies and even physical spaces which focus on sound and vibration to provide access to altered states without substances.

Meditators Going Deeper and Wider

One thing I feel like I’m seeing more of is people getting into various forms of non-dual teachings such as Advaita Vedanta. I started to practice it around 2.5 years ago with some regularity.

It seems like non-dual practices like self-inquiry that aim illuminate the deeper truth of the illusory self are meeting many Westerners who’ve been on the cushion for awhile. For the devoted seeker, the “what’s next” after basic concentration practices, can point to practices that erode the ego’s stronghold and catalyze shifts in identification. At least that seems to be the consistent journey with myself and select peers. 

Below is a map of how my 10 year meditation journey  has evolved relative to some primary inflection points in the awareness journey. In this graphic, I consider the top part of the pyramid, embodied non-duality which certain traditions deem “enlightenment.” In this state, you realize you are that which you see, and what you see is you. I don’t claim to have embody this, but definitely experience it with growing frequency.

Right now if you want to learn Advaita Vedanta you need to  read books, go on youtube to watch people like Sam Harris, Rupert Spira or Angelo Dilullo, or work with a teacher. Though I think most of society is likely not ripe to engage here, many people who have been on this path will start to go in this direction working on realization at the consciousness level.

In addition to expanding at the consciousness level, there is also the territory of exploring the heart’s intelligence and energetic capacities. I used to think that all practices and spiritual evolution led you to the same experience which was more about where you were in the continuum of enlightenment vs. how you got there. I’m actually not so sure about this anymore.

I have worked extensively with the non-dual teachings, the heart, and energy and it seems like the outcome is quite different and additive relative to simply performing non-dual meditation. Intense focus on non-duality will make you very present, but it does less for all the subconscious programs which make you triggered and pull you out of presence. I think more people are becoming aware of this and looking to layer in additional modalities.

Judging by how I see others behave, it seems like sometimes the heart opening occurs with deeper levels of realization, but it’s not a guarantee. There’s a lot of very awake assholes out there. There’s also the question of without the heart component, how deep you can go once you’ve reached “enlightenment.” I don’t claim to know the answer here, but according to my wisdom school, there are many stages of enlightenment past embodied non-duality which are hard to access without the heart work. I kind of take all this with a grain of salt and listen to my internal compass, refining my own truth along the way.

There is a lot of overlap with all of these things, but also explicit work that can be done to advance your heart capacity. Outside of Heartmath, I see very few popular companies advocating and teaching about how to work with the heart. Sure there are book and teachers, but they’re not mainstream.

Maybe these are not company problems and are more teacher problems. I don’t know. But these all seem like they are starting to hit the early adopter curve and will become more commonplace as mediators begin to mature.

Extra Sensory Perceptions and Abilities

I think we need Hogwarts or Xavier Institute (X-men) for the cultivation of extrasensory perceptual abilities…half joking, half serious.

The only reason that supernatural or paranormal abilities are considered unnatural is that they are experienced by a small minority of the population. The truth is they are part of the human experience and our birthright. The reason most people don’t experience these capacities is that they’ve been deeply conditioned about what’s possible and/or have not done the requisite work for these capacities to emerge. Like any nocebo, if you don’t believe in it, it won’t work.

Mystery schools have been around for ages, but they’re hard to come by and fly pretty under the radar. It feels like you kind of need to get invited or something vs. applying online. I wouldn’t know. There are a fair amount of people out there claiming to possess and teach these abilities, but to the untrained eye, it’s unclear who is the real deal and who is just operating from the spiritual ego.

I have experienced many things considered ESP: the emergence of a direct Source connection (intuition), channeling, self-healing, telekinesis, interacting with astral beings, remote viewing, seeing auras…the list goes on. Some have stayed and continue to grow, while others were temporary phenomena. Anything that stays over time just becomes integrated into your experience and is no longer seen as anything special or unique. It just is.

My perception of the emergence of special abilities or  siddhis as the yogic traditions call them, is that they are both emergent and can be nurtured/improved with instruction and practice. The emergence will take care of itself with consciousness work, but where there is opportunity is more high-quality systems that recognize and nurture the seedlings of these innate capacities. 

I made my own attempt at this with my Guided Intuition course which taught people how to unlock and effectively wield their intuition. The course taught entry points on how to access divine guidance on demand, as well as ways to increase the flow and recognition of spontaneous insights. From my perspective, the course was a big success with an NPS score of 80 and many people citing all types of benefits, insights, and transformations.

My hypothesis for the course was that many people have this latent ability, yet haven’t received any guidance on how to work with it. This proved to be true and I feel like can probably be applied to many forms of ESP. 

With these types of educational programs, I think results will vary based on skill (spiritual maturity + innate proclivities) and practice like most things. Regardless of where you are starting, the training wheels provided by these programs will help people start on the path or accelerate from where they are today which is immensely valuable…getting started is half the battle!

Many ancient wisdom traditions bode against seeking out these experiences, seeing them as a distraction from true realization. These phenomena emerged organically in my life which inspired me to learn more about them. I now see them as tools at my disposal on a path to a more ultimate goal vs. pursuits to get lost in. They make my life better so I use them as I see fit. I don’t think my Creator would have bestowed anything on me that was not intended for me.

Therefore, my view is that there is nothing inherently wrong with experiencing and nurturing these natural human capacities. It’s just important to be cautious of getting too attached to them which may later stand in the way of more expansive experiences. 

I’m excited to see what unfolds as more people get in touch with these things.

Consciousness In the Workplace

There is no doubt plenty of opportunity to integrate our inner transformation work into more shared spaces with others. In fact, I think it is imperative if we seek to co-create more effectively. 

Because spirituality is still a bit taboo in lots of Western society, many people continue to do their inner work in a silo. This is likely very different in other parts of the world where it is a fixture of the culture. 

I think we’re going to start to see this change as more leaders in the workplace increasingly become passionate about consciousness and recognize the unity in all traditions. Instead of seeing spirituality as something that divides people based on all these religious roles people have taken up, my hope is that more people will recognize the evolution of consciousness is a fundamental part of the human experience that bonds us.

I am noticing indications that we are moving in this direction all over. More and more leaders I know go through training like the Conscious Leadership Group. My fiancee has a chief of staff recruiting firm and has been asked to do searches for candidates who show a deep interest in consciousness. I was on a founder call recently and dropped the C-bomb (consciousness) in my introduction and many people’s faces perked up.

It didn’t feel like this 5-10 years ago.

I think there will continue to be a need for more tools, training, and technology to help nurture this part of themselves into the workplace. Companies are increasingly supporting the whole individual with family care, physical health, and more recently mental health whether that’s in the form of access to providers (i.e. Lyra Health) or subscriptions to meditation apps. It seems like supporting spiritual health is the next frontier which will likely be rebranded consciousness/awareness and become separated from religion.

One business idea I’ve thought about is a product that helps companies measure and improve “company consciousness.” Consciousness would broadly be defined as the collective health of the attitudes, thoughts, feelings, behavioral patterns, and relationships of their employees all bucketed under “awareness”. The idea would be to establish a set of standards, shared language, resources, best practices, measures, and accompanying tools that help employers take an active role in developing individual and collective awareness in their company. Imagine if your company was helping you reprogram your limiting beliefs or process experiences that impede you from your highest expression.

There’s much to explore here, but I think we’re just going to see lots more integration in the coming years than we have today.

Food and Water

I know in part 1 and earlier in this article I talked about how consciousness drives the response of the body, citing the nocebo phenomenon; if we think something is unhealthy, the body will respond accordingly. So how does a section on healthy food jibe with that idea?

I am still very much trying to understand the deeper truths here. I don’t claim to have all the answers and don’t claim to have absolved myself of all my programming. Though, I do have an incredibly open mind, experiment on myself, and reflect diligently on my experience.

What I can say is that there seems to be some beings in history who have completely absolved themselves of common beliefs and rules related to the maintenance of the physical body. There are also clear examples where humans body’s seem to conform to the predominant cultural narrative. Just look at how at one point it seemed like most people had bi-phasic sleep and now we think something is off if we don’t sleep 8 hours a night. What’s really driving this? Is it the environmental circumstances or the concept imbued upon our consciousness?

I’ve witnessed how my own body behaves like a robot when I’ve been exposed to an idea. I’ve also see how this response can shift when I change the information. I think for most humans, the programming is so deep with a lot of body and food related concepts that they kind of need to conform to the constructs in their consciousness in order to be healthy. I know I still do in many ways. If this is true, it means the incessant media consumption on what’s healthy can actually unintentionally create a prison for ourselves.

I still maintain that over time as you expand your awareness, you can gradually change these programs. This takes a tremendous amount of awareness and unwinding.

I also would also note that as I have evolved spiritually the things I naturally want to put in my body are healthy, high vibration foods. It’s like even in the absence of the programming, my body craves nourishment. So even if you are free from the limitations of your conditioning, there seems to be a higher order force that pushes you towards supportive consumption. This is why you may see a Guru ingest poison or pop some LSD without consequence in order to prove a point, but this never ends up being their default lifestyle. My guess is the natural compulsion has to do with the law of resonance.

Food As Energy

Coincident with my energy-centric view of the world is that food contains life force. The idea that food has prana is something that Ayurveda has taught for ages. The more life force and resonance a particular food has with our unique system, the more nourishing the food is.

How do we know what has lots of life force? A simple rule of thumb is that the closer a whole food is to its natural state, the more supportive its energetic profile is. For example, picking fruit from a tree in your backyard and eating it immediately will have more benefits than something that is 2 weeks old and uses a ripening agent at the grocery store. The same can be said of fresh wild-caught game vs. fish from a salmon farm or mass cattle production.

With all the emotional healing and energy work I’ve done, I have cleared many emotions that have been absorbed from other people and inherited in my family line. In fact, the tendency to absorb other people’s energy when drinking “spirits” (alcohol) was a huge contributor to me cutting it out of my life. Inherited energy is a bit different in that it was passed down at birth.

Sometimes these energies clear organically with an intuitive or somatic knowing, other times I have literally relived memories of people in my family line. I can cite the situation or circumstance when the emotion got stuck in their experience which was subsequently passed down to me.

When you have these direct experiences, you start to wonder - where else am taking on other beings' stuff? If I can absorb someone’s anxiety at a party, it is conceivable to me that the emotions of animals could be transferred to me through eating them. This has pushed me to always try to buy meat from local farms and wild fish who probably have less trauma.

Because so much of this is opaque, I think people with money will gradually move towards buying local as best guesses. Some people will also grow their own food or just move to parts of the world where the food system is healthier. For example, we are going to Costa Rica for an extended time next year just to feel what it’s like to live in a blue zone. I am very interested to see how my body feels

One way to get around the opaqueness of our food quality is again muscle testing. If there is a more precise method to pick up an avocado at whole foods and know whether it has been grown with harmful pesticides, I haven’t found it.

When your food has pesticides or lacks life force, it will test poorly. You can get even more granular with measurement scales to calibrate things similar to David Hawkin’s work. This is something I am considering creating a training on in partnership with my mentor around food and supplements. If learning this is interesting to you, let me know here.

Plant Consciousness

Another interesting food concept that fascinates me is how the consciousness of plants can play a role in healing and nourishing our bodies. It’s nothing new that herbs have healing and energetic properties. But can it go deeper than this? Can we develop a relationship with plants where they serve as guides and activating agents in ways that it’s difficult for humans to do otherwise? I am starting to believe the answer is yes.

Indigenous societies have understood that plants have an intelligence that can be used for healing and transformation for ages. They treat them like brothers, sisters, and teachers. Many modern scientists completely refute this. Examples of working with plant consciousness range from a shamanic dieta where you merge with the consciousness/intelligence of a particular plant, to psychedelic journeying and medicinal remedies where the plant is harvested in a way to preserve its consciousness. I currently am working with someone on supplementation protocols which emphasize working with plants in a preserved state and it has been very helpful relative everything else I have done.

If you think plants don’t have intelligence, go do some plant medicine and talk to me. I think as more people understand this, we’ll start to see some emerging and updated ways we work with the plants that moves beyond just an amazon order.

Minerals

Because of overfarming a lot of our food lacks the minerals that it once did. We need minerals to thrive. Two incredibly rich sources of minerals are shalajit (I use this brand), which is derived from remnants of old sea beds now found in the Himalayas, and Sea Moss from the bottom of the ocean. As always, the source you buy it from will determine the quality. 

For example, I was buying this expensive, well-branded shilajit for a long time. The website was nice and the reviews where great so I figured it was good stuff. When I started muscle testing, I noticed it tested poorly. I was confused because shalajit was touted as the best stuff on earth? I came to learn that a lot of shilajit is harvested underground in contaminated environments vs. at high altitudes in the Himalayas which is where they became renowned for their healing properties. 

How the hell is the average consumer supposed to know this? And how much money have I wasted on things that I thought were good for me, but were actually mildly toxic?

I guess most of us are flying completely blind. This is again why being able to test the energetics and integrity of your food and supplements using your body’s innate intelligence is such a profoundly game-changing capacity. I literally threw out 60% of my high-end supplements from respected brands because they all tested like shit.

Looking at over $1,000 in the trash can is quite an experience.

Water Quality Awareness

Water quality is something that I think will come into focus for more people. A lot of our water is polluted with heavy metals and plastics. This is a known fact.

Over a year ago, I performed a number of heavy metals tests and tested high for fluoride and radium. Apparently this can be high in Texas water. I threw down and bought this Naturally filtered home filter. I then tested all the water in our house and saw a massive improvement.

A berkey is a good starting point, but consider how often you shower or wash your hands? The skin is the largest organ in the human body and unfortunately, these toxins can still get in that way. It feels like this is mostly under the radar still and I imagine it will become more popularized.

Aligned Communities 

I’ve been thinking a lot about communities.

It seems to me like some interest groups are better served than others. If you hold edge beliefs and interests as my friend

Justin Mares

calls it, by default, you probably need to put some work into finding your people relative to those living the default script. 

One thing I learned teaching the Guided Intuition Course and participating in a community for founders into spirituality is that there are many people on the consciousness evolution journey that are craving community right now. Traditional religions had churches & temples which provided built-in fellowship for people around a shared identity and set of ideas. Many people undergoing paradigm-altering transformations have very few people that they can relate to or talk with about these experiences. It can feel lonely and like no one understands you. I know because I felt like this for a long time. A friend recently said something to me which I agree with:

99% of the people going through spiritual transformation, can’t talk to 99% of the people they know about it.

I am seeing such a demand for this from people I meet through various things I create. Everyone wants to find a tribe that has a shared context. One cool community I like for those into consciousness that is publicly accessible is PAUA created by

Loic Le Meur

.

Clearly, I am into a lot of fringe things that resonate with some more than others. These beliefs impact where I want to live, how I want to eat, how I spend my time, how we want to raise our kids, and so much more. The ideal state is to have an aligned community that supports your preferences and values both in the physical and digital world. To me it feels like the digital communities for people living at the edges are more accessible than physical ones. This might also just be a projection of my own experience.

I think we’ll see more of these interest-based physical communities for people who are not following the default narrative pop up in remote parts of the country or outside the U.S. One I recently became aware of is Yoko Village (Santa Teresa and the Netherlands) which seeks to create a network of sustainable communities with an education system that families can plug into around the world. 

I’ve also seen many other versions of this. For example, I have a friend who believes our system is doomed and moved with 100 people to the boonies in the northeast. They have created an entire self-sustaining, off-the-grid community with a school and everything. For him, it’s about complete freedom and autonomy if the world goes goes to hell. Then there are people like my new friend

Rudy de Waele

who moved to Ibiza to be a part of a  regenerative community  because this is where he sees the world moving too. He wants to align himself to where we are heading. Long story short, I think we will see more of these edge communities pop up to help foster more aligned living which so many of us seek.

Closing Thoughts

Some people will probably read this and go “Whoa, this dude is out there!” 

I love being out there. Exploring the edges of experience is one of the best parts of life.

Throughout all of history, there was usually someone being “out there” before there was a recognition that it actually represented a form of improvement. I just learned about how at one point a Dr. washing their hands before surgery was considered very out there!

Having this natural curiosity also represents great opportunities for entrepreneurs. As far as mainstream adoption goes, who knows the extent and speed to which these interests will take? I’ve tried a lot of stuff and this is just what seems to have an obvious improvement on my life. One under-discussed dynamic in the marketing time conversation that I think about is evaluating opportunities from the societal consciousness level. Many things I shared here would not resonate with the predominant population. However, there will no doubt be certain inflection points when some will! Guessing this is all part of the fun of being an entrepreneur and investor I suppose.

I maintain that working on your consciousness is the most edge work you can do. The more we grow here, the more the rules of reality and possibilities seem to shift in compelling ways. This is way more interesting to me than what you can do with GPT! Though I’m not above some productivity improvements too.

I love advancing things I am passionate about and am already creating/tinkering with various things in these spaces. I’ve also made some investments. 

If you or anyone you know are doing cool things related to any of the above or are interested in potential collaborations, feel free to email me or ping me on Twitter. I’m always open to hearing ideas (warning: I'm having a baby any day now so no guarantees I will be able to get back anytime soon!)

---

If you like my writing, feel free to click the ❤️ or 🔄 button on this post so more people can discover it on Substack 🙏