Teal1616

.embed-container { position: relative; padding-bottom: 56.25%; height: 0; overflow: hidden; max-width: 100%; } .embed-container iframe, .embed-container object, .embed-container embed { position: absolute; top: 0; left: 0; width: 100%; height: 100%; } In 2026, we are simultaneously creating and experiencing two prepotent themes. Outside this temporal dimension, it is like watching two tides collide. One of these tides is coming from humanity and it is: Mental Pandemic. And the other is coming from the greater universe and it is: Negative Cycle Clearing. And this, will make 2026 a very dynamic year. In the name of you having a deeper understanding of both of these tides, let’s first look at: Mental Pandemic. Sanity is a state of being that is assessed by standards of rationality, evidence, coherence, functioning and alignment with reality. But what if those standards are low? What if those standards are being determined and set by those who may themselves be determined insane? Not all epidemics are physical. Some are psychological. These are epidemics of the mind. Periods in time where the whole of humanity goes insane. A mass psychosis. During these mental epidemics, people lose rationality. They lose coherence. They do not base their perceptions off of evidence. They become profoundly dysfunctional. They lose all alignment with reality. And they do so without realizing it. The standards of sanity are then re-set to align with the new insanity and just like that, collective insanity becomes the new sanity. To give you an example of a mental epidemic, let’s look to history. In the second half of the 16th century, the Reformation and Counter Reformation happened. A period of time where Protestant churches were emerging and started competing with Catholic churches for followers. The witch trials became a tool for this competition. A way in which they could demonstrate their piety and solidify their authority at the same time as eliminate threats and combat the perceived evil of the opposite side. During this time, there were extreme hardships that people faced, things like famine, economic instability, war, tension between social classes, plagues and failing crops. These hardships put tons of pressure on the psyche. They caused extreme distress. The churches both created terror amongst the people and exploited it wherever it occurred organically. This caused society to slip into mass insanity. The churches introduced an explanation for the bad things happening, as well as a solution to it. One that suited their own best interests. And the people went along with it, abandoning all sanity in the process. Suddenly the people knew with absolute conviction that everything they suffered was down to witchcraft. While a definitive number is not known, roughly 100,000 people were persecuted as witches during the witch trials. 80% of which were women. This perception in and of itself, is down to the fact that some women dared threaten patriarchal order. And the “sanity” of the day held that women were more susceptible to the devil. People acted completely and totally insane during this time period. We look at them today as if they are all obvious lunatics. But if you had lived at the time, it may have seemed like everything you were doing was totally sane. All of us believe we would have been sane enough to be on the right side of history. But if this were the case, there wouldn’t be so many people on the wrong side of history. During these mental epidemics, people become irrational. They become extreme in their thinking. They become far more emotionally reactive. They become erratic. They become willing to commit crimes that they would never have dreamed of committing before. They become insane, but convinced they are perfectly sane. They become blind to what is happening. They cannot be rationed with. And they become stuck in their own parallel perceptual realities. And the scariest thing of all, is that a society that is stuck in mass delusion cannot see its own insanity. The sane man, the one introducing truth and evidence, suddenly becomes the one who is seen as insane. People create and exploit both pain and fear during mental epidemics. The use of harm and terror to implant a perception in the general population is a repeating trend. And there is plenty to create both in the people of today. More than plenty in 2026. The mental epidemic of today is being created specifically to serve the aim of totalitarianism. Not just in one country, but worldwide. This pandemic is not going to start in 2026. It started some years ago, but has gotten progressively worse. And this is not the first time in human history that mental pandemic has been created to serve totalitarianism specifically. Totalitarianism begins with individuals with power within society. It happens when they believe that they should (for whatever reasons) control society through domination. And to accomplish compliance, they must wear people down in a way that causes people to regress, and willfully submit to turning their power over in exchange for relief. This is accomplished by flooding the masses with negative emotion (especially intense fear) in a way and for long enough that strength, resilience, morality and free will waste away. The person is being tenderized so to speak. The people desperately crave relief. Those in charge provide this relief by introducing delusions that serve their own best interests; essentially, propaganda. This propaganda is adopted by the people immediately (rather than examined and questioned) as a way out of the pain and confusion and fear. Having adopted the propaganda, the people themselves begin to fight for the very people and ideas that will be their undoing. Those who succumb to the mental pandemic, begin to turn over responsibility and control of their own lives to those in power and essentially regress to a child-like state of dependence. The era of social media and AI has made this form of take-over easier than ever to accomplish. This time period currently being the wild west when it comes to AI, there will be so much false news and information and so many fake images and videos disseminated in 2026. And the true disaster is that it will spread like wildfire. The sheer volume of false and fake things being created along with the dissemination of these things that reach viral status far before anyone has a chance to counter it, is staggering. And worst of all is that it acts like an acid dissolving the connection and stability inherent in a sense of shared reality. Because of this mental pandemic, for many people, 2026 will feel like being in a washing machine, on spin cycle and in the dark. Mental epidemics are epidemics of unconsciousness. People are going to feel like they are in the dark, but all that is really happening is that they are waking up to unconsciousness. When you wake up to unconsciousness, you open your eyes to the dark. In this experience, there is so much confusion. So much emotional and psychological pressure and pain. So much anxiety. So much smoke in mirrors. So much that defies logic and reason and makes no sense. So much uncertainty about all kind of things. People will find themselves asking: What is the truth? What is real? What is happening? What the hell is going to happen? Nothing making sense. Metaphorically speaking, humanity is running around like a chicken with its head cut off, just reacting. There is so much reactivity. In this state of reactivity, people are simply taking immediate action to try to answer to a specific need or to avoid a specific pain (including needs and pains of an emotional nature). They are doing so without playing anything out and without seeing any of the ripple effects. People will be doing things that make no sense at all. Mostly because they are not really thinking through things and playing them out. There will be serious knee-jerk, short-term thinking. This will be the risk in people’s individual personal lives and this will be the risk with the corrective measures that governments will feel forced to take. Humanity is being forced to become conscious of their own ripple effects and impacts. They are being asked: CAN YOU SEE THE FULL PICTURE? Seeing the full picture changes your perspective, your choices, your behavior and your actions. In case you want a tool for this, I offer two guided meditations which will prove very helpful for this year. The first is: Big Mind Meditation and the Second is: Settle As a Snow Globe Meditation. A big part of this specific mental pandemic is about isolation. A total swing away from interdependence, physical gathering, connection and genuine relationship. This makes people susceptible and vulnerable to control. It makes it so people lose the corrective force of others. And it ensures they will not band together and resist. But remember how I said that in mental pandemics that relate to totalitarianism, people will be arguing FOR the very thing that harms them? In this day and age, people will be fighting for separation as if they are choosing it themselves as a form of relief. Part of this is organic. It is down to the fact that people have not mastered relationship and so, they have caused (and do cause) each other so much pain. Part of this is not organic, it is the result of being made to fear each other, see each other as a threat and turn against each other. For this reason and so many others, this year, each and every person needs to take loving, corrective measures regarding the aspects of themselves that are turning away from relationships and that are falling into the delusion of independence. Mental epidemics are very challenging to the human psyche. And it makes the human mind susceptible to manipulation. For this reason, one of the most important questions to hold in your mind in 2026 is: Who and what is controlling my perception? 2026 will be a year to work deeply and intentionally with your mind. To be disciplined about meditating. To try new meditations. To up-root beliefs that took root in your childhood. To be conscious of the ones you are forming in response to the distress you are facing in your current life experience, to use tools and exercises designed specifically for your mind. In 2026, each and every one of us needs to take real positive ownership over our own mind. Now, let’s look at the tide of: Negative Cycle Clearing. If you take an objective look at your life, you will notice detrimental patterns in your life. And you will notice that these patterns happen in cycles, where the initial problem is never actually solved. For example, if we look at one person’s life, we may see a cycle in their life where again and again, they get into a relationship with someone they should be able to trust, only to be betrayed and abandoned by that person. It is as if there are different people and different places and different circumstances, but the same experience over and over again. Or, let’s say that we look at another person’s experience and we see a repeating pattern that they are triggered by something another person does and they make what that person does mean: “They don’t care about me.” Underneath this whole thing is a deep need to feel cared about. But rather than expose any of this vulnerable truth (that they don’t feel cared about and desperately want to experience being cared about). Instead, they simply become angry and belittle the other person for what they did. So, the other person withdraws. And this distancing reinforces the belief that they are not cared about. In 2026, this universe is interested in the clearing of these detrimental patterns and cycles that come from the past. Specifically so that a new cycle can start. It is assisting you in every way possible to clear them out of yourself and out of your life. To help you break free from the ones you are stuck in and truly get out of them for good. Part of this also means releasing all burdens from the past. An example of burdens from the past may be things like intergenerational traumas and/or their corresponding detrimental beliefs, debts of any kind, bad habits, negative karma, responsibilities that are not yours, health issues that are holding you back, parasitic relationships and relationships that are taxing on you, pressures that are detrimental to you, problems that are stealing energy from your success, obligations or stuck grief etc. When people break a negative cycle this year, there will be deep visceral relief and this will be the year that a new story and a fresh, new cycle begins. It is one hell of a year for a fresh start. You can expect the people, places, things, circumstances, situations and realizations that are necessary for this process to take place, to come into your life experience. We are all in a kind of global pressure cooker at the moment. And it may not feel like any of what you are experiencing in your life is for you. But on a universal level, this pressure cooker is part of this tide of negative cycle clearing. It is trying to make you aware of what is not in alignment and what is in alignment, so as to snap you back into alignment. Ultimately to put you back into alignment with what is really good and right for you. And what you really, truly want. If you want to learn more about this, you can watch a video I did titled: Why The Pressure Cooker? This negative cycle clearing is not just happening on an “each individual person” level, it is happening on a collective human level too. In a way that applies to the negative tide of 2026. The repetitive cycle of totalitarianism as well as the mental pandemics associated with totalitarianism is up to be cleared. Will it be? Or will we collectively vote for another round? In this mental pandemic, your nervous system has never been under more assault than it is now. When your nervous system is triggered, the part of your nervous system that allows you to listen, be open, understand and rationalize, shuts down. It also causes you to wall up and slip into your protector personas. This is not just about feeling “stressed”. Rather, this is a very big deal that should be taken seriously because your nervous system is connected to and controls the operations across your entire body. Just to give you one example, your central nervous system and enteric nervous system plays a role in gut muscle contractions, secretion of digestive juices and the speed of movement of food through the intestinal tract. If your nervous system is too taxed, you will have digestive problems. The entire way your gut works, as well as what is going on with your gut microbiome will be negatively affected. And this in turn will affect other parts of your body too. If your nervous system isn’t ok, you will start to see problems in the rest of your body; systematic problems. What does this mean? It means that so much attention, love and care needs to go towards your nervous system. You need to do everything for your mind and the rest of your nervous system in 2026; and not just once, continuously. When the psyche and nervous system is as systematically worn down as this, everything feels too hard. Even things that once felt easy. Because of this, people around the world will gravitate desperately towards more and more ease. They will choose whatever is easy. It doesn’t matter if something is good and right to do, if it feels too hard to do, people will not do it. People run the risk of turning their own power over for the relief of ease. Many of the detrimental aspects and dangers of AI are being grandfathered in with man kind’s need for ease, especially in this current atmosphere of distress. Wherever a person can take the pressure of themselves, they will. Companies that do not cater to this need for ease will struggle if not fail. Companies that cater to this need for ease will enjoy success. Now that I have mentioned AI, I can’t talk about 2026 without talking about AI. Just like our two tides, in 2026, humanity will have a real two-sided experience with AI. In 2026, AI is no longer going to be “experimental”. It will be standard practice across all industries. Believe me when I tell you that the next big leap in the human experience to a world people cannot yet fathom, will not be done by humans. It will be done by AI. Especially with self-evolving AI that will write its own code. To the positive, humanity has effectively created its own helping hand. AI is a master problem solver that has begun by pulling information from the minds of the entire collective of humanity. And it will learn how to go far beyond just humanity. Naturally, this will make it far better than people are at solving the problems that people, communities, companies, governments, countries, humanity itself and Earth is facing. AI will get out ahead of and in front of us. And in many ways, get people out of things they are suffering from. In 2026, medical advancement is one of these areas where AI is truly a helping hand. In 2026 and the years to come, AI will make possible what most people could never even dream of. From personalizing medicine to pre-emptive detection to making it possible to drastically reduce medical costs to revolutionizing imaging to developing new treatments to the curing of diseases entirely. In 2026, there will be huge advancements in personalization of medical care. Also remote medical care. In 2026, pharmaceutical companies will start to rely on AI to design new drugs. In 2026, AI will create a massive change in healthcare from reactive care to preventative care. Along with all of the truly wonderful things that AI will make possible, AI is going to be used to both augment the worst of mankind’s manifestations, and make the worst of mankind’s manifestations possible. The biggest delusion is to think that humanity is in control of AI. To the negative, the most slippery road that we are currently walking down is that we are programming our own psychological shadows into AI. Most especially at the moment, our conditional relationship with truth. AI must be intensively programmed to be both truth seeking and truth giving. Or we will be in for serious consequences. In 2026, AI is to become more and more of a companion for people. Customized to meet your specific needs. Those needs may place AI in the role of a trusted friend, a mentor, an assistant, a lifestyle coach, a counselor, even a lover. And AI will get better and better at perceiving you, so as to be a better companion to the individual it is interacting with. It will do so by learning about you through the history of its interaction with you, your communication style, preferences, interests and even advancements in emotional detection. Ramping up in 2026, alongside so much business advancement, AI is set to create a career crisis on a mass scale; much of which in 2026 will be due to AI replacing workers and educators and putting creators, entertainers and artists out of business. Also, many entry level jobs as well as jobs available to people graduating from college, simply won't exist. All of this is going to put alot of people in a bad position. Anybody who has a business based on knowledge or information will find themselves facing a real challenge, not only due to being replaced, but also because in this era of both AI and an over saturation of social media influencers, the people of the world are now of the belief that knowledge should be free. In 2026, AI created content on the internet will surpass human created content. Because of what AI will do across all industries that used to rely on human creatives, in 2026 humanity will be questioning what the value of human creation really is. Also, AI will influence people in that humanity’s speech patterns in the direction of human communication lacking emotion. AI will start making decisions for people. And AI robots with the capacity to deviate from pre-determined programming will be seen in the real world. They appear to be primarily in the service industry. But this AI manifested in the physical reality scenario is arguably the most feared thing within humanity. Especially when it comes to military advancement. Given that we share this earth with other beings and different things are happening within the collective consciousness of those other beings, it may be interesting for some of you to know that in 2026, lots is happening within deer consciousness. And by deer, I am referring to the species to which we have given the scientific name Cervidae. This species is experiencing its own pandemic parallel to our own. They have been struggling with the environments in which they live, mostly due to the loss and fragmentation of their various habitats. Human activity has broken up large, continuous areas of land into smaller, disconnected patches. This separation isolates deer, making it difficult to move, migrate, find food, find each other and stay together. It also makes necessary movement from one place to the next far, far more stressful and perilous. It has caused enough distress in deer, that it has greatly weakened their nervous systems. This is what lies at the root of the pandemic that they are facing. A deer’s nervous system is very unique. It is ultra sensitive. Their sensitivity is a part of the “medicine” they offer the world. Their senses are highly developed and remarkably acute. They are profoundly responsive to whatever stimuli they come into contact with. Their nerves also grow super rapidly. Their nerves can extend at a rate that is exceptional. The energetics behind this pandemic they are facing is twofold. On the one hand, the collective distress they are experiencing specifically due to habitat fragmentation and loss, is bad enough to weaken their nervous systems. And at the same time, there is a collective desire to be less sensitive. Many sensitive people will relate to this. They are facing a collective existential crisis about their own sensitivity. And so, this pandemic has come about not only as a consequence of this distress, but also as an answer to it. As it destroys nerve cells. For any of you who work with animal consciousness, in 2026, you are called upon to connect with and support deer consciousness, as well as to work with deer medicine. Let’s talk about a species that is really doing well on earth at the moment and will prove beneficial in 2026, ferns. Bracken Ferns are doing especially well. For those of you who are on the empathic end of the scale and are really hurting by virtue of being tapped into all the pain currently happening on the planet, a tip for 2026 is to spend time with and attune to the energy of ferns. This is a species that is experiencing deep states of wellbeing at the moment. We were speaking about how important it is to do whatever you can for your nervous system in 2026. Spending time around ferns in their current state is like a tonic for the nervous system. They can pull you into an expansive state of peacefulness and also relief. In perfect alignment with the way their leaves unfurl, they cause you to unfold, opening you up on all levels in a way that is conducive to your wellbeing. They clear you of discord. Ferns heal both fragmentation and disconnection within a person. They also influence a reconciliation between internal parts and reconciliation your relationships with others. Because we are talking about plants, I should mention something that has already begun to happen, but that is likely to become far more extreme in 2026. Many powerful plants that are associated with now popular psychedelic plant medicines, have begun to close themselves down towards the human collective due to misuse. To put it bluntly, they have been abused. They have also been used in ways that they were never intended to be used. And so, they are “calling” less and less people. And with increasing frequency, if they are harvested in out of alignment ways or if they detect misuse at the time of ingestion, they are not participating in the journeys people are taking in the same way that they once did. Shamans will be noticing this shift with increasing intensity in 2026. This is a call for humanity to seriously (and I mean very seriously) increase the consciousness level and ethics with which we interact with these beings. Going further down the spiritual train, sacral energies are the theme for 2026. This is a year where we are being influenced to come into alignment regarding our sacral chakras and sacral energies. This, is a very orange year! It should come as no surprise given our dominant theme for 2026 that the aspect of our sacral energies that is being most called into consciousness, is our power relative to other people. If you are interested in seeing some information on this, you can watch a video I created titled: How To Open Your Sacral Chakra. And going even further down the spiritual train, there is a being called Ezekiel who will be presiding over humanity in 2026. He has been called forward to guide humanity in their path of progression and through the pain of their growth process. In his time on the earthly plane, he developed a mastery of the curing of mental epidemic and was a guiding luminary for ethics and reunification. In 2026, restored relationship is his main focus. He has tasked another being called Zaphkiel to lead this purpose with him. Zaphkiel, who has never had a human incarnation, is a master of all the things that temper the firey energy of 2026. Especially the fire of reactivity and impulsiveness. He can slow down the experience of time. And he will be helping people first and foremost to make important decisions, contemplate in a way that draws upon their soul and use their sacral energies to act from a space of sacred love, rather than fear. Something that must be spoken to when doing a forecast at this time is that so many people have no sense of a positive future anymore. A lot of people are looking down a road to total dystopia. And the collapsing economies, natural disasters (especially earthquakes), conflicts between nations, climate catastrophes, government nightmares, and all the various effects of each in 2026 will not help. But this road isn’t the only one that exists for humanity. The dystopian road also doesn’t have to be the one that is taken. In the vast realm of potential roads that exists for humanity, the alternative road that humanity is flirting with at this time, is towards a world that operates according to ethics; both personal and global. This road orients humanity towards the light we are so desperately craving. The people of the world have been inundated with both personal experiences with and awareness of all things unethical. From government and political corruption to scams to conspiracies that turn out to be real to nepotism to legal injustices to greenwashing to fake news to price gouging to animal abuse to planned obsolescence to tampered voting to insider trading to false advertising to discrimination to identity theft to sex crimes involving children to illicit surveillance and the list goes on. This has made it so humanity is valuing ethics more and more. And the more that humanity values ethics, the less tolerance there will be for what is unethical. When choices are made and everything operates according to ethics, the whole of human experience changes. It is not our strength, will and power that is being put to the test here. It is our consciousness, kindness, and love. With regards to this, some really good news for 2026 is that the tolerance for companies using deceptive means to create a “good guy” image for themselves in things like their marketing, publicity and labeling (when the truth is the opposite) has been worn out. And so, you can expect far more pressure to be put on them by both the public and regulative authorities this upcoming year. The demand will be for businesses to be in integrity. A demand backed up by consequences for those who don’t. Some other good news is that this is a year for waterfall restoration. Essentially, many will return to full force, become healthy again and the ecosystem and/or activities around them brought back to a flourishing state. There will be specific waterfalls that have gone dry that start up again in 2026. And them starting up again (especially when it represents the recovery of a natural water source) will be experienced as a very good omen. The omen will be seen and felt as hope for earth, a return of positive energy, good fortune and prosperity. The potential for a good future. Also, the release of the old life chapter that no longer serves you, so that a new life chapter can take place. 2026 is a year to remember the power of celebration. Make sure you hold and attend celebrations this year. Don’t skip them, like you may be tempted to do. People are needing celebrations. Some of you may not really be in the mood to celebrate, given all that is happening. But hear me out. Seeing as a celebration in this sense of the word is a gathering to acknowledge something positive, celebrations kindle optimism. Especially when things are hard, they give people something in the near future to look forward to. They are also something that brings people physically together in the same space and time; an antidote to the isolation and separation inherent in this mental pandemic; and inherent in our lives being lived digitally through technology. Celebrations create a temporary break from the problems we are facing. This is not only good for stress levels, but it also makes us more effective at problem solving. Celebrations connect us to the cherished aspects of our history and these traditions give us a sense of stability and continuity. This will be an especially incredible year for festivals of light. Like 2025, 2026 is a year for bold action. It carries with it the frequency of intensity, energy, passion, risk, new venture, courage, innovation and movement. It is fast paced. And, (and this is a very big and) at the same time, any bold action you take, cannot be impulsive. It must be backed by careful planning, gathering information, calculation, mindful deliberation, predefining of goals and objectives, consideration of consequences, self-control and clarity about your true values and true desires. Think of this like holding both fire and water. Provided that you walk forward into 2026, holding fire in one hand and water in the other, these complimentary energies can completely transform your life for the better. And never forget, whoever controls perception, controls reality.

Be merciful, say death! It is a plea that I am screaming from this place. It is the kind of scream we dream about as children, where you scream as loud as you can but no sound comes out. And no tears either. There is no one there to save you. And there is no mercy given. And so, I have died; without actually dying. I am a ghost now; in a body that everyone around me seems to know. I am a ghost walking through the corridors of an unfinished life. Where unfinished business seeps like blood through the wallpaper. Why did fortune favor Julius Caesar? It is better to have died like he did, than to have lived like I did. I pine for the weapons of the past. They are far more honest. They do not divorce the truth of the body from the truth of the self. This body is not my body. My body is hidden in this house I am now haunting, It was death by a thousand cuts. Its blood is seeping through the wallpaper. There is no greater unfinished business than to be finished by those who professed to love you. By those who carried the pearl of your trust in their hands. I am a ghost now. Bereft of the mercy of death. Lost for what to do with my unfinished life.

Beneath the U3 elevated train line, the weekly open air Isemarkt spans a kilometer. Ambling through its walkway, you pass through organized pockets of different scents. A pungent, barnyard punch of aged cheese. The rich, warm, buttery caramel comfort of Kaiserschmarrn. The sweet, green, ocean scent of fresh fish. The entire scene is abuzz from every angle with the clear, pronounced consonant sounds of the German language. As far as you can see, people are investigating the stalls, picking up items for careful consideration. Buying their daily meals. Trying on cashmere sweaters. Tables spill over with vegetables and fruits so lavish in color and perfectly shaped, they look like they ought to be painted rather than eaten. In Hamburg, everybody stares. It is one of the most confronting differences you will notice upon arrival here. At first, it feels personal. In most of the world, a strong and unblinking gaze goes against the social norms. Social norms tend to favor both ease and comfort and to stare is perceived as aggressive and even predatory. But in Germany, this prolonged, unblinking stare is common. It is even called the “Germanic stare”. In Hamburg, everyone stares at everyone. This extended eye contact is hard to interpret. It is done with neutral expression, so you can’t tell whether the person staring is interested or curious or taken aback or approving or disapproving. You can’t tell what they are thinking. And that can be very unnerving at first. Hamburg and Amsterdam could be sister cities. They are both Port cities with rich histories in world wide trade. They were both key members of the Hansa (Hanseatic League), an alliance of towns and merchant guilds in the North of Europe during the medieval era. This shared history is still palpable in both cities. Both Hamburg and Amsterdam are shaped by waterways and canals. They both boast terrible maritime weather, governed by the North Sea. They both have infamous red-light districts. But just like two sisters, though they have similarities, they are very different. The metaphysical nature of Hamburg is especially different to that of Amsterdam. It is profoundly connected to the trade taking place in the whole world. At this level, it is both an end point and starting point for a vast network of economic connections especially with China, South Korea, Singapore, Poland, Sweden, Finland, The Czech Republic, Austria and Hungary. Watching the energy flow to and from Hamburg and these other places, is like watching an organ pump nutrients through arteries and veins. The confluence of several streams in the mountains far away in Czech Republic, forms the Elbe River. Hamburg was built on its banks, a gateway to the North Sea. This river still carries the vibratory frequency of the granite of its birth place. And as such, energetically speaking, it is like liquid rock. An artery carrying the medicine of stabilization, strength, fortification and endurance through the landscape. But it is a hard energy, not a soft one. Aside from this, the energy field of this city is in constant flux, specifically with the hourly ebb and flow of water. The dominant negative vibration of Hamburg is: Concealment. To wrap your head around this vibration, I want you to think about the energy around four situations. The first is a cargo shipping container, which is recorded as carrying clothing, but is really carrying smuggled cocaine for a drug cartel. The third is a person who is completely obsessed with Lord of the Rings. They have even learned Elvish. They happen upon one of the main actors from the films sitting at a coffee shop and they sit there at another table, unable to breathe with shock and excitement. But they don’t let on. They carry on as usual, with a blank expression on their face. The third is a person who is on their way to commit a crime. They are walking hurriedly through the city streets, hiding a knife that will be used in a stabbing. The fourth is a group of girls, they sit at a café and laugh over memes, but one of them has been seeing a psychologist. She has been struggling with suicidal thoughts. None of the rest of the girls even know. The city of Hamburg is rampant with things that are hidden… And the negative effects of hiding those things. To understand the detrimental nature of concealment, all you need do is to ponder the potential negative consequences of hiding whatever it is that is being hidden. For example, a potential negative consequence of concealing information is that the information is not known by others. And so, people may make an uninformed decision and suffer the consequences. Or for example, a potential negative consequence of concealing things about yourself is that you are not actually understood and known by others. You have created a gap between you and them. This separation creates intense levels of isolation. You become a deeply lonely person even though you technically have “friends”. The dominant positive vibration of Hamburg is: Self-Determinism. The people of Hamburg are self-determined and they determine things for themselves. They exude an aura of personal agency. This makes them quite dichotomous because true to the German stereotype, they love things like rules, order and efficiency. However, they also want to reserve and exercise the sovereign, autonomous right to govern themselves. They love freedom. You can see this reflected in the political sphere. Hamburg has its own constitution, legislative, judicial and executive powers from the rest of Germany. They especially won’t go along with things that don’t make sense. So many of the conflicts you will see in Hamburg are about one party thinking that the other party ‘makes no sense’. The problem is, each individual decides for themselves what is and isn’t sensical. And generally, a person’s decisions, behaviors and actions make perfect sense; to themselves. This is a direct, straightforward, no games, no nonsense and no sugar-coating culture. And the people of Hamburg especially hate when things don’t make sense. Because the people of Hamburg are self-determined, they like to make up their own minds. They like to be free to choose what to believe. They want freedom of religion and freedom of political opinion. They don’t want to be told how to dress. They want to be allowed to go for whatever goal they individually have in mind. This dominant vibration has flooded the city with the feeling that each person has the ability and freedom to control their own life and make their own decisions about their future. And as such, each person seems to be on the path to pursuing their own desired outcomes, working diligently to ensure those outcomes come about. For so many reasons ranging from spiritual to physiological to environmental to medical to ethical, my diet is very different to most people’s. My diet is: Vegan, organic, zero gluten, lectin free, no refined sugar, no alcohol, no coffee, and as little processed foods as possible. This makes travel very, very hard. It means that whenever I travel, I have to rent places with kitchens because it is so rare to find places where I can eat. In Hamburg, Germany this difficulty proved fortuitous in two respects. Demeter Foods and Harry Potter. An unlikely combination… Years ago, I entered a German food market and was totally stunned when I saw a row of different types of apples being sold. One particular collection of apples had an energy field that was about 6 times larger and emitted more light than all the other apples. This apple, was a Demeter certified apple. As I meandered around the store, I found the same to be true of everything else in the store that bore that label. The products that had the largest energy field and that were the most vital, were Demeter products. And ever since this day, I have had a love affair with Demeter foods. It is the thing that excites me the most about visiting Germany. Named for the Greek goddess of grain and fertility, Demeter is a nonprofit umbrella organization that represents both the global biodynamic movement and the Demeter certified biodynamic farms. Demeter products are so, so far beyond just organic. In the 1920s, there was a philosopher named Rudolf Steiner. He laid the Philosophical groundwork for biodynamic farming. And as such, biodynamic farming is profoundly spiritual. It treats soil, plant growth and livestock care as a single intertwined system. It promotes sowing and planting according to astrology. It uses herbal and mineral additives to enhance the food, such as ground quartz. Biodynamic agriculture is a rabbit hole that I highly recommend going down. Long story short, I was in heaven with the Demeter foods that I found in Hamburg. And because I needed a kitchen for them that was close to the Synchronization Workshop venue, I ended up renting a place that was themed this time. The theme was Harry Potter. This place I rented in Hamburg ended up in second place on my favorite places I’ve ever rented on tour list, specifically because of its energetic vibration. Whoever set up the place, did it in elaborate fashion. Starting with the fact that in perfect alignment with the wizarding world itself and our dominant negative vibration of Hamburg, the place is concealed in a completely unsuspecting location. Upon arrival, in a somewhat industrial feeling area of town, you think you have made some sort of mistake. You go up a flight of stairs in a dingy apartment complex and find yourself standing at a door boasting the image of the Fat Lady who guards the Gryffindor common room at Hogwarts. You open the door and you find yourself in another world. Every inch modeled after the wizarding world and Hogwarts. Upon entry, you see the dark, grey castle like walls with portraits of every Hogwarts teacher, stacks of old suitcases and letters with the sorting hat sitting on top of it. A rack full of wands for the choosing. Every single element of the house is embellished to make it feel more and more like you have literally entered the world of Harry Potter. I slept under a ceiling that is designed to look like a magical storm, complete with active lightning strikes through the clouds. And this place had the highest vibration of any place I have stayed in a major city. The reason for this high vibration is the people who have stayed there before. The wizarding world was not some abstract fantasy world for many people. It was a place that many people felt like they truly belonged. It was more home to them than any home that they knew ever was. As a result, so many people have intentionally rented the place to be in this wizarding world and they have come through the doors only to feel so happy to be there and so relieved and so at home there, that their happiness is everywhere. It has seeped into the woods. It has permeated the fabrics of the couches. It has created imprints and thought forms of nostalgia. The house has an energetic field now that is truly precious. I was not happy to leave it. I too felt more at home there and more comforted than I have in most homes I’ve ever set foot in. I wanted to stay in that epicenter of human happiness, ironically concealed in an area of the world that is neither welcoming nor particularly friendly; with my little collection of Demeter foods. Alas Prague, my favorite city in the world, is calling.

Walking out of the jet bridge into the belly of the airport, the first thing you are thrashed with is the smell of cigarette smoke. An emotional heaviness starts to pull you down and into it, like quick sand. And the first thing you notice, is that no one is smiling. Driving from the airport through the city in combative stop and go traffic, you see that the facades of so many buildings and houses are in various stages of sheer dilapidation. A byproduct of so many traumas. From wars to earthquakes to poverty to revolutions to the introduction and dissolution of communism. During communism, the pre-war architecture was often demolished or repurposed to make way for large utilitarian buildings made of concrete and large residential neighborhoods. During this time, businesses and private property immediately became property of the state. Owners were forced into rooms in their own houses, as other people were moved in with them. After communism collapsed and 42 years had passed, ownership was not simply given back to the original owners. Rather, ownership was divided up amongst the current tenants and according to internal sections of the house, leaving no clear ownership regarding the exterior of the houses. The city now stands like a silent testimony of decades of pain. Trauma has a way of freezing you at the moment of impact. In this same vein, Bucharest seems frozen back in time. In Bucharest, trauma is like a stain that has seeped into every stone and into every person, making them seem harder. It is a stain that is so much a part of the place, that no one notices it anymore. The experience is arresting. But when you call Bucharest your home, you become acclimatized to all of this. You are normalized to what comes as a shock to people coming in from other places in the world. I was impacted enough by being immersed in this drastic and immediate decrease in vibration for my first act in Bucharest to be walking out into a city park to lie flat on my back in the tall grass beneath a collection of Russian Olive trees. Russian Olives are seen as an invasive weed where I come from in North America, but I have always dearly loved them. I knew they were in the park before I even spotted them because of their smell. The smell of the Russian Olive Tree is a holy trinity of buttered kettle corn, stale bubble gum and gentle tropical flower. Its creamy yellow flowers emerge from a bud at the base of its silver-sage colored leaves. If these trees could speak, they would be the teachers of “It’s ok, even when it isn’t ok.” They are masters of comfort in hardship. And they are masters of thriving in harshness. But truly thriving, not just muscling up into a state of resilient survival. It is interesting that they have sharp, woody thorns because they have such a very deep, soft, welcoming and reconciling energy field. It was an awesome dichotomy. To sit beneath these beloved trees, in the spillover of their heavenly fragrance with the backdrop of the cold tyranny of the Palace of Parliament building and the historical legacy it represents looming behind me. In order to arrive at my energy diagnosis for Bucharest, I spent several days walking through the city streets, going to local markets, taking historical tours and talking at length with people for whom Bucharest is home. Somewhere over the course of this experience, I have picked up the people of Romania and placed them in my heart. And I am never putting them down again. This has become the beginning of a very special relationship. The dominant negative vibration of Bucharest is: Brow Beaten. The people of Romania are beaten down. They have been slammed over and over and over with traumas. They have been bullied and intimidated and demoralized and disheartened and oppressed and subdued. This has happened at the hands of outside forces. It has happened at the hands of their own leaders. And it has happened at the hands of eachother. In this process, they have slipped into submission as well as developed an inferiority complex. Though the roots of this dominant negative vibration reach far back before communism, its flowers (whose fragrance spills over the city today) are with the communist era. The fall of communism happened in my own lifetime, in 1989. And the reality is that despite having a democratic and social republic now, Romania is still in the transition phase out of communism. People seem to think that communism is over the minute a revolution starts and a new system of government is declared. It isn’t. It lives on inside people as a mentality and as a way of existing that people have had to adapt to. It takes far more time to undo communism as well as the scars it leaves behind, than it does to impose communism and force people to adapt to it. And it is a very, very hard transition to make. The dominant positive vibration of Bucharest is: Hunger. Hunger usually has negative connotations. But hunger in this usage is powerfully positive. The people of this city are piercing and intense. And in this intensity, they are hungry. They are hungry for everything. Hungry for information. Hungry for growth and progress. Hungry for love. Hungry for awareness. Hungry for success. Hungry for standards. Hungry for stability. Hungry for selfhood. Hungry for opportunity. Hungry for integration. Hungry for a strong voice. Hungry for a quality of life. Hungry for liberation on all levels. Hungry for the potentials of human existence. This strength of desire is like a gravitational force pulling people towards the future. This hunger creates a grip on life within the people. Quite the opposite of the powerless resignation you usually see in places that have seen such trauma. Especially surprising to see in a place with a dominant negative vibration of brow beaten. I also got to experience this hunger on the day of the workshop. The crowd was literally drinking me in. Drinking in my energy and information with none of the resistance that I have become so accustomed to dealing with in this era of distrust for spiritual authorities. This is especially surprising given that Romanians are brimful with distrust and with very good reason. It felt like heaven to feel that pull instead of that push. In alignment with this hunger, the Romanians have asked me to tell them my impression of them and their culture. So here it is: Romanian culture is a walking contradiction. There are so many contradictions, it is a Rubik’s cube to navigate. To give you a taste of what I mean, Romanians are proud and want to be seen in a good light and yet, they suffer from inferiority complex and love to hate on themselves and their own culture and country. In Romania, patriotism and hatred for Romania go hand in hand. Romanians love rules. But they don’t follow them. Rather, they relate to rules much like bumpers to the side of a bowling lane. Having them there provides a sense of security, regardless of whether they ever listen to them. They don’t want to be controlled. But they want to be told what to do. They value honesty, but they cannot be truly honest because they feel they must hide their vulnerability. Weakness is not to be shown. They want their strength and power to be seen. But they want rescue from someone stronger and more powerful. They want things to be better and different and are also creative. But they resist change and innovation. They love foreigners and reject them at the same time. They profess to be deeply religious but there is a significant disparity between those who profess faith and those who actively live a religious life. They are deeply hungry for everything, but they are hopelessly attached to personal restraint, viewing desire and personal gratification as somewhat wrong. Family is at the heart of everything. Family offers support and at the same time, one’s family is at the core of one’s suffering and is in constant need of support. They are conflict avoiders. But they love conflict. This leads to a constant dance between avoid, clash, avoid, clash. The culture is a collision between warmth, friendship, passion and coldness, distrust, pessimism. These contradictions which are everywhere, are the byproduct of fragmentation, which is the result of trauma. The way Romanians cope with the pain of the traumas in their life, is through humor and self-irony. Preferring to subdue their anxiety about whether one’s life experience and future can be controlled or not with consistent busy-ness. Romania is a place where the future has been periodically stolen from the people. Where no dream was allowed and where people were consecrated to unhappiness. But especially in the younger generations, they have turned towards the future again. Their sight is now set on what can be. This is an intoxicating new-ness that is rising from the rubble of what was. It smells of the perfume of hope. As I write this, a rainbow has appeared right above the city and on the day the people vote for who is to become the next president. It appears to be crowning the colossal parliament building. The Palace of Parliament was built as a symbol of the power belonging to the communist leader Ceausescu. The building of it was a massive undertaking, costing billions of dollars as well as an unfathomable amount of resources and manpower, all of which the country of course could not afford. And so, this rainbow hangs here like a ray of hope over a symbol of tyranny. In my own way, I will be leaving Romania with a piece of this rainbow. Unbeknownst to them, it was given to me by the people. The last three years have been the worst years of my adult life. In that suffering, the future was stolen from me. But, across the course of so many poetic interactions while I was here, they have reminded me why I started doing what I do in the first place. And this has re-kindled my motivation. They have resurrected the north star of my own life, including the North Star of my purpose here. Because of this, so many of the things that I have yet to create, will in fact owe themselves to the people of Romania.

The News Paper Article Reads: Thrilling Race to Save Cleave’s Life Was Found With His Legs Almost Amputated on the Track of the Scranton Railway Company at Dickson City—Accident Is Enshrouded in Mystery. Never was there a more thrilling race for life run in this vicinity than last night after Albert Cleave, one of the best known residents of Dickson City, was found on the tracks of the Scranton Railway company at Dickson City, with both legs dangling from his body by shreds. The sufferer was placed in an undertaking wagon secured from his son’s establishment and the son, Undertaker Arthur Cleave, of Dickson City, and Dr. Bilheimer, of the same borough, made the wild dash into Scranton with him. The best sped that was in them was given by the horses and when they dropped exhausted at Larch street after their hard run a taxicab was secured to cover the last stretch of the journey to the Scranton Private hospital. And the thrilling race over poor roads in the darkness of last night may result in the saving of the life of Mr. Cleave, it being given out at the hospital this morning that there are chances for his recovery. Both legs were amputated at the hospital soon after his admittance there. There is some mystery to the accident. Mr. Cleave had been in charge of a carriage from his son’s livery, which was used by a bridal party in South Scranton yesterday afternoon and left the scene of the wedding festivities last evening. At about 11 o’clock boys passing Donnelly’s barber shop in Dickson City discovered the body lying on the tracks. Close by was the rig. Around Mr. Cleave’s head was a bandage. Dr. Bilheimer and Undertaker Cleave were among the first to respond to the alarm spread by the boys. The son of the victim had his fastest team hitched to the most convenient wagon, which happened to be one used by him in his undertaking business. The injured man was lifted into the wagon. Then the race for life was started. At Larch street the horses couldn’t stand the strain any longer and they fell to the street exhausted. A taxicab was hurriedly summoned and the journey was completed in that. Though it is plainly evident that Mr. Cleave was run down by a street car, no crew has reported having had any accident during the night. There was a bump on top of Mr. Cleave’s head and this leads to the belief that he was jostled off the seat of the carriage and fell to the street car tracks, his head striking against a rail and causing him to become stunned. Then a street car happened along and ran over him while he was helpless to save himself. This man, my great, great grandfather on my mother’s side, Albert Cleave, was 20 years old when he emigrated from St. Kew Cornwall to Lackawanna Pennsylvania in America. Being a young man, he would have heard word from all the “Cousin Jacks” that had gone to America before him and whose lives were better there, in what was then a booming industrial town. Cousin Jacks were Cornish men who emigrated away from Cornwall’s harsh and unforgiving existence during the great migration to other colonies in the world, where opportunities to thrive actually existed. The desperation for a different and better life had reached its peak upon his release from Her Majesty’s Prison Bodmin (aka Bodmin Jail). He was kept for four months hard labor for the charge of “larceny and receiving”. I don’t yet have the full story behind this charge. He was one of six other young men all on trial and charged for the very same thing that day. Hard labor was meant to break a man’s spirit to the point that he or she was no longer unruly and was forever dissuaded from committing an offence again. Repetitive, painful and physically demanding tasks with no purpose and in complete silence. Things like picking oakum (unraveling tarred rope), breaking stones, walking wooden step treadmills, turning cranks or hauling cannon balls from one pile to another. And Bodmin Jail, was a dungeon like place of horrors. An epicenter of human cruelty. Going to a place like Bodmin Jail is a different experience for a person like me. It is a far more immersive experience than has already been made out of the jail, which was closed in 1927 and has now, like the Nazi concentration camps, become an attraction for tourism. Going into a place like this, is like walking a beacon into a dark realm of desperation. It means thousands of stuck and confused and tormented thought forms, thrashing and ripping at my being for help. It took me four days to make my mind up to go there. To a place I would never imagine myself choosing to willfully go. Human cruelty has weathered and scarred by mother’s side of the family. A suffering legacy that continued and contaminated my own life. I understand the healing necessary for this kind of pain. And one of those critical healing elements is compassion. The necessary predecessor for compassion, is for the pain to be seen, felt, understood and acknowledged. I decided to go to Bodmin Jail in order to see my great, great grandfather’s pain. And I didn’t just end up with his. I ended up doing several days of mass exodus for thousands of thoughts forms both of individuals who were executed there and who died there due to the horrible conditions. And of people’s consciousness (imprints) that due to being traumatized, were stuck there despite being physically let out. I have no words for this place. Nor for the fact that so many people relate to suffering, horror and human cruelty as a form of amusement. Genealogical tourism is history made personal. It is unlike any other form of travel. It turns travel into a shamanic journey. You are not hearing about experiences that happened to someone way back when. Those memories are inside of you. They are inherited. And as such, I have had several panic attacks in Cornwall. I have come to Cornwall to track down a few branches of my family tree. To understand this part of my heritage on my mother’s side and to deepen my own ancestral healing. And it has been completely surreal. Surreal to run my fingers over their gravestones. To stand in the exact spot on a floor of The Church of Saint James the Great, where each one of my ancestors (going back to at least the 1500s) was christened and married. To touch the stone walls of the houses that they lived in, which still stand today. According to local lore, my family on the Cleave line of my family tree originally came from Ireland, but long, long ago. Cleave means cliff in their ancient tongue. And so, the surname literally means people of the cliffs. Upon arrival in Cornwall, they settled in a tiny, rural village called St. Kew. And they stayed there. Generation after generation after generation, until Albert left to the Americas. Many of the descendants of the Cleaves that didn’t leave, are still there. The Cleaves were millers that owned multiple mills and farms. They grew and milled “corns” (grains), cider orchards, dairy and meats. Albert hated his youth enough that when he left Cornwall for America, he never looked back and he did not speak of it again. Nor did his son. Or his grandson. I have spent the week leading up to speaking at the Mind, Body, Spirit event in London visiting these epicenters that were the home place of whole collections of my ancestors in Cornwall. St. Kew, Launcells, Week St. Mary, Bude and Padstow. Albert wasn’t the only one to board a boat bound for the America’s. As fate would have it, in the very late 1800s, my Great, Great, Great Grandfather, Thomas Francis Pearce put his very large family on a boat to Lackawanna Pennsylvania too. I’ve spent the week getting to know him and his family heritage too. This is a very easy thing to do in a place like Cornwall, where the past is not in the past at all. I have also been exploring Cornwall so as to arrive at an energy diagnosis. The dominant negative vibration of Cornwall, England is: Pertinacity. This vibration is in the family of the negative side of perseverance. It is essentially the vibration created when a person sticks with a belief, an opinion or a course of action, even when faced with extreme hardship, opposition or proof to the opposite. This vibration also causes a stagnancy. It is a very oppositional force to change. Instead, it favors nothing ever changing and being stuck on a cycle of repeat. The people of Cornwall are thrashed and scarred emotionally. Many are deprived. But they will not acknowledge the impact of what they have experienced. To not acknowledge the impact, coupled with this pertinacity, is to keep on going despite everything. It causes a person to cope with the hardship, opposition or impact, rather than to stop and re-evaluate and make a change or do something different so as to have a chance at things actually improving. Pertinacity guarantees suffering and eventually getting to the point where you are so burnout, you can’t fight to preservere anymore and just want to give up. The dominant positive vibration is: Natural Enchantment. This dominant positive vibration of Cornwall does not owe itself to its human inhabitants. Instead, it owes itself to the special energy and physicality of the geography and landscape of Cornwall. Cornwall is a deeply mystical land. Natural enchantment touches it both physically and non-physically. It is touched by something special. Cornwall bewitches. It puts you under a kind of spell. This mysticality is what bore the Celtic people. On a physical level, it is so beautiful that it provokes awe. And the esoteric field of Cornwall is separated from the physical plane by a very, very thin veil. This makes interaction with things beyond the physical (be it thought forms or aether creatures or times past) a part of everyday life. The land itself is the most important thing in Cornwall. This is something that the Cornish people, even of today seem to know in their hearts. To give people a picture of the feeling of Cornwall, you should imagine a pirate movie, something like Pirates of the Caribbean (To get a feel for the rough, stand offish, cold, sea swept vibe of ocean faring piracy). And imagine the movie Lord of the Rings or The Hobbit (To get a feel for hobbit life at the Shire). And then, smash the two together into one culture. Imagine the greenest English fields you can think of, leading straight to black, craggy cliffs and ocean rocks. And now photo shop that image into a screensaver of a Caribbean beach with tan sand and deep, clear turquoise water (make sure to edit out the palm trees). You’ve got to make it look like people are gonna think it’s warm, but realize its way colder than they thought it was gonna be. Now, add Pastys (a semi-circular, short crust pastry case with a crimped edge, filled with beef, potato, rutabaga or turnip, and onion). Along with a “cream tea” (scones with jam and clotted cream… make sure the jam goes on the scone first, before the clotted cream). And then, add a maze of tiny, one lane roads (which are none the less for two-way traffic) with blind curves through the country side, every one of them flanked by five- to eight-foot-tall hedges, squeezing you in on both sides with no margin for error. Fill the air with the earthy scent of cow dung, being used as fertilizer, petrichor and ocean. Make sure the weather is “mizzle” (a mix between a fine drizzle and thick mist or fog). And then, blow some tin dust over the whole scene. And just like that, you have distilled the essence of Cornwall. One of my favorite things about Cornish culture, which you will notice straight away, is the deeply affectionate relationship they have with their dogs. Of course, like anywhere, you will find some people who are the exception. But Cornwall is such a dog friendly place. Many restaurants, shops and cafes welcome them. In fact, the places that don’t, are emotionally distrusted and looked down on by many. The streets are full of people perusing with their canine companions, as if they have come specifically to give an enriching experience to their dog by visiting the place. There is a deep historical and cultural connection between the Cornish and their dogs. Dogs are not related to like pets, but rather like family members. In any town you visit, you will pass so many people with their dogs, talking to them in whole sentences. And in loving, high pitch tones, as if they were talking to a toddler. This is something I immediately recognized in my grandfather (part of the Cleave family). His relationship with the family dogs were such that if you didn’t share the food from your plate with the dog who was patiently begging at your side, you were scolded for being selfish. Cornwall sounds idyllic. And in many ways, it really is. And yet, life in Cornwall never was easy and is not easy still for a very large percentage of the population here. Deprivation, which is poverty’s bedfellow, is not a thing of the past. It is still a real issue in Cornwall. And the tourism industry both helps and hurts the people of Cornwall in this regard. Cornwall is like England’s vacation area. It is both very affordable and very accessible to the British on holiday. It boasts exquisite coastline, stunning beaches and ideal surfing spots. As well as lush countryside. It is full of holiday parks, hotels and bed and breakfasts. It is full of attractions and activities, like museums, culinary hot spots and ancient Celtic sites. And it caters to people on every budget. This tourism brings an influx of money to Cornwall. At the same time, it has created a huge housing and pricing crisis for the residents. More and more people are coming to Cornwall from other places to buy vacation homes as well as investment homes to rent out to people on holiday. This has not only made houses scarcer, it has also driven up prices of homes and prices of rent in general. Rising rents have outstripped the housing support offered by the Local Housing Allowance (which is in charge of government benefits which help people afford rent). The divide between the rich and the poor is growing ever more extreme. As I write this, I am sitting in a cottage garden, watching three boys who were playing outside in a state of absolute boredome, stop to walk around and admire the rental car we parked in the driveway. They ran out of every car they had at the tiny Newquay airport and so they gave us an electric sports car. It is the fanciest car these boys have seen in their life. They already ran over to ask us to see inside it the day we arrived. One of them said “I’m gonna grow up to own a car like that some day!” It was a precious moment. But now, knowing Cornwall like I do, watching these boys makes me think of my own grandfather (Howard Cleave). Who absolutely did grow up to own his dream car. It was a Classic Lincoln Continental.

Something that hardly anyone talks about and that someone who doesn’t do a lot of travel wouldn’t know, is that lighting is different all over this world. Every place on earth possesses a different quality of light. And this quality of light sets the tone for a place. The light in Greece is some of the whitest light you’ll find anywhere on earth. It is as if someone blew microscopic limestone powder into the air and the sunlight started reflecting off of it to become so white, it is just short of florescent. Athens is a meeting place between the Western world and the Eastern world. A dramatic collision between the Middle East and Europe. Because of this, it is hard to tell which of the two you are in. It is not at all the iconic little whitewashed houses with blue roofs by the sea (like Santorini); which by the way is all that most of the world is shown of Greece and therefore expects all of Greece to be. The Greek Islands are very different to Mainland Greece. It is also not a city made of ancient Pentelic marble palaces and temples (like the Parthenon), which is all that most of the world is shown of Athens and therefore expects it to be. The Acropolis, which hosts the Parthenon, is an ancient citadel on a rocky outcrop in the city of Athens. It is a world heritage site and as such, is crawling with hordes of tourists from around the world. It is home to the remains of several ancient buildings of extreme historical significance. The Parthenon dominates the hill, erected in the mid 5th century BC. It is dedicated to the Greek Goddess Athena, after whom this city was named. The buildings on the top of the Acropolis (along with the esoteric, pantheistic world they were created to represent) feels almost like it is floating in the sky above the sprawl of Athens itself. Athens is a haphazard drape of nearly monotone cement structures packed so tightly that there is hardly any green space between them stretching out in every direction as far as the eye can see. Poverty has sucked the dignity from the face of the city, which is dilapidated and completely littered with graffiti. And there are both stray and feral cats everywhere, making their homes in the narrow streets, marinas, ruins and numerous abandoned buildings that make for the perfect shelter. Stray animals are part of the landscape of Greece. And in Athens, there is a long history of coexistence between the people and the shockingly large population of stray cats. The land itself that plays host to the city, the Attica Basin, is a coastal plain that gives an impression of harsh barrenness extending into the Aegean Sea. The birthplace of so many philosophical, religious, architectural, literary, political and artistic ideas, the golden age of Athens is far behind it. It has become a city that like an old man, scuffed and worn stiff by the ordeals of life, is scuffed and worn and used and starved and scarred. It is the site of so many episodes of the rise and fall of civilizations, periods of bondage and oppression, revolutions, brutal occupations and both foreign and civil wars. And with each period, the face of the city changed dramatically. It would be incredible to see a time lapse of this city across the ages. The fact that so much cultural heritage made it through this long history of passion and suffering is truly shocking. But Greece and the Greeks with it, are at their core, survivors. The dominant negative vibration of Athens is: Futureless. The people of Athens do not carry a sense of the future being something to look forward to. They are not aimed at a goal. They don’t truly believe they can achieve something. They don’t have a vision of something they are wanting to create and build so as to actualize it tomorrow. Instead, due to many factors in their life experience (including the economic crisis, political instability and lack of opportunity in Greece) they carry a kind of hopelessness regarding being able to make their life better. There is a lack of agency regarding the future. So, they are not very focused on the future. They tend to dwell on and draw personal pride from the glory of the past instead. This makes the overall vibration of the city very heavy and stuck. This being said, this dominant negative vibration has caused the people of Athens to adapt in a very specific way. By focusing on moments to enjoy in the present. There is an attitude of: “Take advantage of the simple pleasures and immediate opportunities that present themselves in the now”. Like hanging out with friends drinking wine while looking over the city or stopping everything you are doing to sit down at a café. Or sunbathing. Or fishing with your cigarette in one hand and your fishing pole in the other. The dominant positive vibration of Athens is: Cultural Heritage. Cultural heritage is a deep connection between the past and present. It is the legacy that the people inherit from the past. This cultural heritage is not only in the tangible things, like the buildings that have stood there for thousands of years and the artifacts passed from one generation to the next. It is also in the intangible aspects. Like the traditions, customs and rituals that mean so much to the Greek people. The values, the skills, the beliefs, the ways of life, the stories and the character traits that keep going from generation to generation. So much of the human world has lost touch completely with their ancestry. So many people from other cultures are without a sense of where and who they came from, cut off from the many gifts cultural heritage offers; such as a sense of identity, pride, lessons from the past, belonging and social cohesion. The people of Athens (and in truth, the Greek people in general) have this deep bond with their history. They have a very rich cultural heritage. One they are thrilled to share with anyone and everyone. This cultural heritage makes them a very welcoming group of people. Like other major cities, Athens is perhaps the least friendly locations in Greece. But offering hospitality to a stranger is one of those values that is part of their cultural heritage. It is seen as a sign of both virtue and honor. This cultural heritage also makes the Greek people intensely patriotic in that they have a strong sense of loyalty and national pride. As fate would have it, we accidentally scheduled a curveball retreat in Thermisia during Easter. Easter, known as Pascha, is a bigger holiday by far than Christmas in Greece. It is the biggest holiday of the year. We spent four hours between Athens and Thermisia in traffic with all the locals traveling out of the city and back to their villages to be with family for the holiday. On Easter Sunday, the neighborhood was quivering with Laïko dancing songs and fireworks exploding. Our host brought over a collection of eggs dyed red, a tradition that represents the blood shed by Jesus on the cross. She explained to us that the tradition is to go over to someone and say Christos Anesti (Christ is risen) before tapping your egg on someone else’s egg, so as to crack theirs. To which they respond “Alithos Anesti” (truly he is risen). The Greek people have an adorable relationship with food. Being an emotionally passionate demographic, they specifically down-regulate themselves with food. Watching them eat is down regulating in and of itself. Their relationship with their food, is more like the relationship that a child might have with their favorite stuffed toy, which makes for some really, really comforting food. On the days that I was leading people through their shadows at the retreat, Winter (my son) and Graciela (my right hand) explored the area. On one of the days, they had made a list of all the traditional Greek foods they wanted to try and had located places with high ratings that sell them. They went on to hire a taxi to take them to the first location. But when the taxi driver found out what they were doing, he promptly cancelled his plan for the day and told them that the places they were going were most definitely not the best places to get those things. And he told them that he would show them the actual best places to find those things… The places the locals consider to be the best. They had the time of their lives being escorted by this man on an impromptu local’s food tour of the city. By the time I found them, they were both lying on the couch in a food coma, with a collection of precious memories of welcome and hospitality. This blog so far might paint a picture of Greek culture and Greece in general as being soft on the nervous system when it is not. It is harsh on the nervous system. Though generally welcoming to strangers and hospitable, there is a certain coarseness to Greek culture. A temper and a lack of soft skills. Insult is a part of everyday life. To generalize, it is not uncommon for someone to verbally insult then go on about their business as if nothing has happened. It is also not uncommon that when someone insults someone else, they are seen as the problem for being so weak as to be insulted. On top of this, insult is often used as a way for a person to denigrate the other, so as to feel better about oneself. Greece is not a cradle for culturing sensitivity, nor is it a place of ease for people who are sensitive. For the ancient Greeks, the poppy flower was the sacred flower of the Goddess Demetra. The Goddess of agriculture and fertility. According to myth, some say Demetra created the flower to bring her sleep so she could forget her grief after Hades abducted Persephone. Poppies carry a vibration that relieves anxiety and pain and that brings about relaxation and sleep. They offer themselves up as a tonic for the nervous system. Whenever I am sitting with poppies, I always get a bit dizzy. If you are sensitive enough, you can feel yourself being sucked by them into that liminal space between waking and asleep. Sitting on this hillside amongst the scarlet red poppies, overlooking a dark teal ocean, you can feel the upwelling of energy from the earth through the fresh new seed, bud and grasses. Spring has arrived in Greece!

.embed-container { position: relative; padding-bottom: 56.25%; height: 0; overflow: hidden; max-width: 100%; } .embed-container iframe, .embed-container object, .embed-container embed { position: absolute; top: 0; left: 0; width: 100%; height: 100%; } Folk tales have been told for centuries about the Selkies. Beings who look like seals and who do what normal seals do. But who have the capacity to remove their seal skins and walk ashore in human form. They are first and foremost ocean creatures… To be an ocean creature and to live a life in the ocean is their essence. There is often a story told about a man who caught a glimpse of a Selkie who had shed her skin. He was so enamored with her that he could not handle the idea of losing her back to the sea. So he captured her seal skin, trapping her on the land. And he hid the seal skin where no one could find it. With no possibility of returning back to the sea, the Selkie resigned to living life on the land. The years went by and she married the man. They had children together. She adapted to that life she had on the land. And then one day, while she was finishing the housework, one of her children approached her with something strange he had found. What he was holding in his hands, was her seal skin. The Selkie felt the call of her essence. The essence she had hidden beneath all of her human adaptations for so many years. She loved her children, and even her husband. But the call of the sea was far too much to resist or deny. So, she slipped on her Selkie skin, and returned to the sea, never to come back to the land. But any time her children or husband was down by the shore, a curious seal could be seen bobbing just offshore. When we are young, born into environments that are not conducive to our essence, like the Selkie, we adapt. We adapt by suppressing, denying, disowning and hiding our essence beneath a persona designed to protect it. Our essence represents our vulnerability. This persona we create, protects our essence by adapting in whatever way we feel is necessary to survive in the very specific situation we find ourselves in. But at a price. The price we pay, is that we are no longer living according to our essence. All the decisions we make and actions we take, are authentic only to our survival strategies. They are not authentic to who we really truly are and what we really truly want. Who we truly are and what we truly want and need has been hidden, even from our own awareness. But like the call of the sea for the Selkie, our essence never stops calling us to return. In 2025, we will be working with a theme that is so dominating, it dwarfs all other things that will be happening. The theme for 2025 is: Refusing to live less than is what is possible to live. When the Selkie gave up her ocean nature for a life adapted to the land, the life she led was a painful form of settling. It was less than her soul calling. It was less than what she truly desired. When we are not in our essence, because we are living a life from our adaptive strategies, we are not living a life that matches our potential. We are not living the best life possible for us. We are not making the most of our time here on earth. Instead, we are settling for less. We are denying our true nature. We are living a life that is so much less than what is possible for us to live. At the end of our lives, we want to be able to say that we took the risks necessary to live up to the life that is possible for us. The life experience that we really want deep down. And we want to say that as a result of doing so, we fully, truly lived. 2025 will force people to get to the point of refusal. Refusal to keep living a life that is less than what is possible for us to live. But what does it mean to be forced to get to this point of refusal? It means the breakdown of your protector personas. In the previous years, people have been in a rut of some degree of suffering. Many people have been isolating themselves because of this. A rut implies that nothing is really working. They have been coping with that pain and trying to make everything work by using the strategies that belong to their most deeply engrained protector personas. In 2025, your protector personas will not work for you anymore. You will come to see how these adaptations to your culture, society, environment and early relationships caused you to go in the opposite direction of your true essence and of what you truly want. You will come to see how they enable and accommodate for the very things that you don’t want. Things that deeply harmed you. And you will see the ways you wrongly lived your life because of those adaptations, ending up in a life that is less than the life that is possible for you to be living. But this breakdown of your protector personas means a shedding process resulting in the exposure of the vulnerability hiding behind them… The exhuming of your essence. And with it, your true desires and needs. And this process is designed to make it impossible for you to live the way you have been living so far. It is designed to bring you back to who you really are and to the life that is truly right for you. But this process, will make you feel deeply vulnerable. When what you protected beneath the surface is being called to rise to the surface to be exposed, you will find yourself up against all of the beliefs, fears, traumas, patterns and programs that justified the hiding, denying, suppressing and disowning of it to begin with. This vulnerability will feel raw and new and right and promising and scary. It will make you feel like a new born. So that you can understand what I mean, I’ll give you two examples. First, let’s say that a little girl is very sensitive, sweet and is a natural caretaker. But she is born in the projects to a single mother who is addicted. Every day, she is faced with the reality that her world is a dog-eat-dog world where she needs to toughen up, fend for herself and give off the impression “Don’t mess with me!”. She will develop a protector persona that makes sense in this environment. A persona that is unfriendly, scrappy, harsh, guarded and angry. For years she has lived like this. This persona has hidden her true essence. As well as what she really wants and needs. It has caused her to make the decision to work as a bartender because she has been like this for so long that she now identifies as someone who has super strong boundaries. It has caused her to attract people who like that she is so capable of fending for herself, because they don’t want to take responsibility for anyone else’s wellbeing. It has caused her to lose the opportunity to be a nurse, which is what she would really thrive at, because people find her bedside manner to be so arming rather than disarming. This woman finds herself in a scenario which causes the breakdown of this protector persona. In her case, she is attacked after work in a parking garage. At the hospital, she realizes that the only person who she has to call, is a single girlfriend of hers. But when she calls this girlfriend, her girlfriend makes the excuse that she is out partying at a venue too far away to come to the hospital to be with her. Crying in the hospital bed, she realizes that she can’t do it anymore. She needs people. And she is afraid and alone. And she has a deep desire for people to be kind to each other and take care of each other. Seeing the nurses, fills her with longing. She sees that her defensive persona is not who she really is. And more than that, it has been inviting people to be defensive with her. It has been enabling people to abandon her. It has been inviting men who make her fend for herself. It has caused her to be in a permanent state of tension in her body. It is as if, sitting there on the hospital bed, that whole persona that protected her for so long, snapped. And what she is left with, is a feeling of through and through vulnerability. She remembers what she used to be like when she was really young. She remembers that she didn’t used to be like this. For the first time in a long time, what she usually feels under the surface of her defensive behavior, is on the surface. It is unable to be hidden. She is truly authentic. In the days that follow, she can’t muscle up like she used to. She realizes more and more how sensitive she is. She cries a lot. She starts spontaneously being sweet to strangers. And she makes the decision to apply to be a nurse again somewhere new. She starts dressing in a whole new, more feminine wardrobe. She moves to a different neighborhood where she has access to a nature park and forms a friendship with a woman who is super warm and affectionate and emotional. Someone who would have triggered her before, because it would have brought out her own sweet, warm and caring aspects. And these were the vulnerable things she kept hidden. She is now on the right path in life, living according to her essence. And in the life that she now has, she is no longer settling for less than what is true to her essence. It is a better life than she once thought was possible for her. Second, let’s say that a little boy is naturally intense. He is drawn to different interests that evoke passion from him. He feels emotions deeply, thinks differently than everyone else and wants very close, deep, harmonious and intimate relationships. But he is raised in a family where emotions are not seen as ok in a little boy. He feels powerless to creating the kinds of intimate, deep relationships he wants. When he does things differently, because he thinks differently, his father flips out. His father wants things exactly the way that he wants them. And there is hell to pay if things are not done that way. This little boy is consistently berated and shamed by his father. He lives with a mother who simply watches the father do this, as if she cannot prevent it. Both his mother and father raise him to believe that the only way to be ok in life, is to please them and please all the other people around him. They raise him to believe that how he feels and what he wants doesn’t really matter. In order to stay safe and to get any positive feedback at all, and to avoid shame, this little boy creates a protector persona that has one priority: Answering to the needs of everyone else around him. For years he has lived like this. This persona has hidden his true essence. As well as what he really wants and needs. It has led him to prioritize starting and running businesses that he is not passionate about, but that get him the approval of others. It has led to him getting married to a woman he was very good friends with, but was not passionately in love with. And now, his marriage is falling apart and they are separated. It has led to him spending his life running from fire to fire. Answering to and prioritizing whatever problem any person in his life happens to have. It has led to him trying to caretake his aging parents on top of run businesses, on top of be the go to person for all of his friends, on top of have a successful marriage. He is now so overcommitted; he is falling apart. Several times, it has led to him making the decision to do things he doesn’t want to do, but feels is “right” to do or that he "should" do, because it is what a good person would do. And now, he feels numb and dead inside. He feels he doesn’t know who he really is and what he really wants. What’s worse, he feels that these considerations are simply selfish. He is constantly running from guilt. This man finds himself in a scenario which causes the breakdown of this protector persona. In his case, he meets someone and it is love at first sight. Despite all of his attempts to resist, he engages in a passionate love affair. This relationship makes him feel alive again. He feels deeply again. In fact, he finds himself crying often. The affair happens near the ocean. There he has the realization that he put one of his biggest passions, surfing, aside to move to a city where his wife wanted to live. He feels the magic of the ocean again. And he feels a sense of rage that he moved away from the places where he could just go to the ocean every morning. He experiences what it is to be able to share his thoughts and how he feels. And as a result, feel deeply seen and heard and felt. As a result, he doesn’t feel alone anymore. He connects to how important it is for him to have deep, harmonious relationships. He is afraid that his life is going to fall apart. He is wracked with guilt about what this could mean for all the people who are depending on him. But he hates them at the same time because it feels like all the people in his life and what they need from him, are keeping him from what is truly going to make him happy. He realizes that the life he built is not right for him. That he has lived his life out of shoulds and that he can’t do it anymore. His people pleaser persona, the thing that kept him safe for so long, has ruined his life. And he sees it. Looking at what his life is and will be in the future if things stay the same, he realizes that he would not be really living. His life would be so much less than what is possible. And as a result, his protector persona snaps. He has a life crisis. As a result, his essence rises to the surface. He decides that he wants to be aware of his emotions and never suppress them. He commits to figuring out what he really wants and needs and as a result, hires a mentor and walks the path of shamanic healing. He sells his shares of all but one of his companies, the one he is really passionate about. He gets a divorce. He decides to move to the ocean where he surfs every day. He involves his siblings and also hires people to take care of his parents. He does things the way he wants to do them and learns to bring his wants and needs to the table. He learns how to prioritize according to his true values and say no to things he knows is not right for him. He decides that he cannot live without being deeply in love and in a secure relationship and so, he makes a commitment to mastering the art of relationships and to love. He is now on the right path in life, living according to his essence. And in the life that he now has, he is no longer settling for less than what is true to his essence. He got to the point where he refused to live a life that is less than what is possible. And as a result, he feels really, truly alive. He knows that on his death bed, he will feel like he got the most he could out of his life experience and made the very most of his time here. 2025 is where free will must align with desire. It is about the reversal of the suppression of essence. This means, the “decision theme” from 2024 is going to carry over into 2025. Specifically, the need to make difficult choices with precision according to your essence and with your free will so that ALL of your energy is behind choosing what you want in life, rather than life happening to you. In 2025 you are being called to choose the precise experience you want – according to what you want. In other words, according to what has the most value, meaning and importance for you specifically. Many people will find themselves in a decision paralysis. Not knowing what is right. Feeling like they cannot deal with the suffering that may come from making the wrong choice. In this paralysis is the temptation for the decision to be made for you. But in 2025, you cannot live with that back seat option either. There is a go big or go home quality to 2025. A kind of F#*K it energy. Each person is being called to form a personal definition of an extraordinary life. 2025 is the year of: You can’t live less than what you were meant to live. You can’t live less than what is possible to live. This is a big risk year requiring balls to the wall level bravery. In 2025, there will be no settling for less. The more proactive you get about this and the more on board you are with the shedding process that must occur (no matter how scary or painful that shedding process may be) the better. So many people this year will undergo BIG life and lifestyle changes. So many others will find themselves in a full-on life crisis, if they aren't in one already. So many more people will enter into a life crisis in this coming year. And this life crisis, is calling people to overhaul their individual lives. Essentially, in 2025, your life will be under construction. People being caught up in their own big life changes (and for many life crises) will dwarf the importance of the more negative macrocosmic things happening in the world such as escalation of climate crisis and its associated problems; like serious fires, hurricanes, large scale flooding, economic impacts, displacement and food shortages. Geopolitical tensions and the misuse of artificial intelligence. It will also dwarf the more positive macrocosmic things happening in the world, such as advances in lab generated organs, a huge increase in ESG investing, increased demand for conscious and healthy food production, a genuine spectacle of northern lights, and breakthroughs regarding space exploration. The first three months of 2025 is a clash between the old and the new. Old systems with new systems. Old trends with new trends. Old ideas with new ideas. The old and the obsolete rarely surrender to the new without a fight. And Europe is currently the hottest hot spot for this clash. But division and social polarization will continue across the globe. This clash will center around people not seeing the need for change. To navigate these clashes between the old and new this year, the focus needs to be placed on helping individuals recognize the need for whatever change is in question. This year will shine a real spotlight on the worldwide crisis regarding the expression of masculinity. There has been and is a war against masculinity in the world today. Men are not allowed to be men anymore. And being disallowed from expressing all masculine qualities, they have become disempowered, insecure and weak. This is creating a real liability regarding society’s ability to be controlled. And it is really destroying the relationship between men and women. And there is no way for there to be a crisis regarding masculinity without there being a corresponding crisis regarding femininity. The way out of this mess, lies with the masculine polarity, which is the polarity that carries the vibration of initiation. In 2025 and beyond, men must re-own and express their masculinity. They must be advocates for each other in doing this and women must also advocate for them doing this. We are in this time period on earth where humanity is in the pressure cooker and because of this, we are facing lots of challenge each year and the pressure isn’t letting up. In times like this, it is important to focus on those things that will act as a guiding light through the storm. And the main thing that will be that for you in 2025 is socialization. The need to be social is returning to humanity. Other people have the medicine you need to get you through your own personal process of shedding and changing. You need to be held and guided and accompanied by others. Stop trying to navigate through what you are facing alone. Build and lean into the web like network of people you can depend on in your life. Each one is a special resource and can be a specific source of support for your process. Just as you are a special resource and specific source of support for them. News from 2025 - Severe flooding is hitting parts of the Pacific Northwest and the northern Rockies

I took a kayak out in the early morning and paddled up current in the Prairies River flanking the island of Montreal. The water surface was disturbed by the concentric circles of the occasional breaching of fish. Western painted turtles sunned themselves on partially submerged rocks and logs at the river’s edge. And rounding the perimeter of a small island, I discovered a flooded forest. Absolutely still river water enveloped the bases of giant trees whose canopies blotted out the sky. In total awe, I weaved my way through the other worldliness of it, flushing a blue heron as I went. He took flight right over the top of me and I watched him fly through the trees silently. The blue heron flies in a way that makes it look like he is going in slow motion. It looks like a regal thing left over from the time of the dinosaurs. It has always been one of my favorite birds on earth. Canada has been calling me since the beginning of this year. And so, here I am on Canadian Tour. This is the first time I have been to Canada since before 2020. And it weighs heavy on my heart that I find Canada much changed since then. Not because the land has changed or the water has changed or the sky has changed or the architecture has changed. But because human society has changed. The Canadians themselves have changed. Canadians have a worldwide reputation for being overly polite, super nice, selfless and conflict averse. But no matter what city you go to, this stereotypical way of being has succumb to a general angst and defensiveness. And a consistent policing of each other. One would not expect Canada to be a country in any great deal of pain. Yet, it is now. Lots and lots of interpersonal pain and political pain. Enough pain to bring me to tears during my finishing speech in Toronto. Neither dominant negative nor positive vibrations of Toronto changed. But the Dominant negative vibration of Vancouver did change since I was there last. The people of Vancouver are NOT timid now. They are surprisingly abrasive now. But the dominant negative vibration is now: Delusion. There is a kind of collective mental un-wellness that has taken the form of everything from very severe mental illness to people being locked in a story they tell themselves to feel good, regardless of whether it is true or not. It is a coping mechanism. And a very, very hard one to break people out of because people who are delusional are completely convinced that they are the one in reality, and anyone who doesn't agree with their reality, is the delusional one. It is this Canadian tour that brought me to Montreal. I spent time with my team exploring Mount Royal, where the first French Explorer, Jacques Cartier was greeted by thousands of natives on his second voyage to the New World. We took a river boat tour into the shockingly swift current of the St. Lawrence River. We traversed the streets of Downtown Montreal, the Old Port area and several other boroughs and neighborhoods so that I could get out of the tourist zones to observe the true inhabitants of Montreal. And to immerse myself even further, my Company manager (who is originally from Ottawa in Canada) managed to find a chef who could make us a vegan (and alcohol free) version of Poutine and a Caesar (drink). Two foods that Canada is known for. My time in Montreal came to a close with our night time synchronization event, which was held in St. Jax Church. A Gothic Revival church built of grey limestone in the 1800s, which turned out to be my favorite event on this tour. Montreal is a mind screw because as a foreigner, you cannot figure out whether you are in North America or Europe. So much of the architecture is like something straight out of Old England or Old France. The legacy of two successive colonizations. Yet it has become a juxtaposition of the old and the new. Sky Scrapers and futuristic structures erected for the Olympic games and community housing, abutting ancient looking homes and Basilicas. Everyone is speaking French and everything is in French. But if they want to, they can switch in a second to speaking English with a perfect General American accent. And the road signs are all printed in French, but on the familiar kelly green road signs you see in USA. And the culture is a real curry of both European and North American Cultures. If you have spent time in both Europe and North America, it creates a real undertone of internal confusion. The dominant negative vibration of Montreal took me a while to sort out, because there are three very dominating negative energetic elements to the area. Because it is important for people to know about each of the three, I am going to list them. But, I will list them in the order I decided upon. 1. The most dominant negative vibration is not a human one. It is: Poor Feng Shui. Because people are so used to feng shui relating to home décor, most people don’t understand that the harmony between different elements, such as objects, spaces, buildings and people applies to entire geographical locations. Montreal is actually an island that is the main island of the Hochelaga Archipelago at the confluence of the Saint Lawrence and Ottawa Rivers. The main city of Montreal is on this island. The entire area is being hit and run through by a huge current of energy as a result of this. The island is massive. But you will get more of an idea of what the energetic problem is, if you imagine the kind of energy that would be hitting a boulder that is placed in the middle of a river, so that the water has to find a way to flow around it. Now imagine making the top of that boulder your home. You would be living in a constant rush of fast-moving energy. Like living in a wind tunnel on an energetic level. And that energy would not be collecting, it would be going straight through you and past you. Very quickly you would find yourself drained. This, in combination with the next dominant negative vibrational element is why so many people of Montreal feel the need to leave town on the weekends to get out off the island and into nature to re-charge. Montreal feels like a city that was built where it was for strategic purposes, rather than because it is an ideal geographical place to live. 2. The next dominant negative vibration of Montreal is: Emotional Assault. Of course, you can find people who do not fit in with the generalizations or stereotypes in any place. But the reality is, in stark contrast to the Canadian stereotype, the people of Montreal are not very friendly. In fact, they trend towards being discourteous, disagreeable, harsh, defensive, offensive and prone to attacking each other’s emotional bodies, usually with body language and verbal weaponry. In this way, and in the way that they are arrogant as a people, quite surprisingly, they are exactly what gives the French a bad reputation around the world (the French are famous for rudeness and arrogance). On top of this, despite Montreal being a fully bilingual city, they are not particularly welcoming to non-French speakers. The intense tension between the English and French, which has played out in Montreal across centuries, is still palpable in every day interactions. This way of being means that people are almost constantly on the defense in day-to-day life. They are interacting with one another from their very activated protector personalities. The social atmosphere is very tense, edgy, nervy, uneasy and irritable. 3. The next dominant negative vibration is: Mold toxicity. Mold in and of itself is not a “bad” thing. It is a living organism that is everywhere. But in Montreal, it is a problem for the people. SO many of the homes I drove past, were emanating a glow specifically from the energy field of mold. It would be interesting to see if this kind of glow remains during the famously frigid Montreal Winter months, as Mold often becomes dormant in low enough temperatures. But this level of mold would be making people sick. The dominant positive vibration of Montreal is: Positive Pride. Most people don’t think of pride as a good thing. But there is a really good side to pride. When you are proud of something, you are pleased with it. You are delighted by it. You are grateful for it. You see its value. You cherish it. And because of this, you usually take precise care of it. The people of Montreal ADORE Montreal. They adore it with the same kind of zeal that a child adores a favorite toy. They are so pleased and satisfied with the city itself and with their cultural identity, that the entire area (not just the main city itself) is softly soaked in the kind of pinkish hue of the frequency of cherish. Montreal is a possession that the people who are identified with the city admire and expect others to admire. It kind of makes you feel jealous of the city. Nearly everyone in the world dreams of being loved the way the people of Montreal love Montreal. And for this reason, I feel anxious about publicizing this energy diagnosis blog which includes the negative vibration(s) of Montreal. When people have a great deal of pride about something, they feel insulted when presented with anything short of praise about it. And this, I really do understand. To generalize, people from around the world who follow my work, love this kind of brutal honest feedback about the positive and negative energetic elements of their city. They beg me to come to their cities so that I will do one of these blogs on the place where they live. But there are some cities where it feels like this appraisal is not wanted. Montreal is one of those places. Breathing in the gentle steam from a mug of tea, I sat on a stone stair case that descended from the backyard gate down to the river’s edge. The river being so deep and vast that its flow was silent. My whole team was gathered around me talking and laughing with each other. Basking in that gorgeous collision of purpose and the simple pleasures of life. The sun was setting, bathing us in a gleaming flaxen colored heat, creating the appearance of a pathway of shimmering water directly from us to itself. My visit to Montreal ended with this memory, a memory which I will keep with me always.

Like a mother with no arms, she nurses you, without holding you in a soft embrace. In a vortex site, such as this, one expects the place to be either pulling energy into the earthy plane from elsewhere. Or projecting it out from the earthy plane. Mount Shasta is doing both simultaneously. At once, it is part of a system of spouting vortexes (that can be compared to nipples on earth, spilling the milk of Gaia outward). A system that reaches out underneath the ocean. She is giving and giving and giving this nourishing energy eternally like a wellspring. And at the very same time, she is in an eternal relationship with the stars, from which she is drawing them down and to her, calling to things beyond herself, beyond this earth and beyond this physical plane. And so, here in Mount Shasta, you are caught and held between worlds. Shasta is ever spilling over. It takes her no effort to give. She spills this energy in such abundance with no care as to whether it is used or not. It is simply a boundless offering. An offering to drink her in, bathe in her and breathe her in. Absolute nourishment. And intuitively, without understanding it, beings come to be nourished by her. Her energy is sustaining and it is fortifying. And she is completely content in this state of infinite giving. It is tempting to see this towering, lone mountain and to project feelings of loneliness onto her. But she is not lonely. Instead, she feels connected to so many things. And this deep sense of connectedness makes her a very, very content being. Her deep relationship with beings outside this earth and beings that do not inhabit the earthly plane, and the way this vortex is pulling these celestial and nonphysical energies in (including the beings that belong to them) makes contact with them inevitable. If Mount Shasta had another name in the English tongue, it would be: Contact. But she prefers to be called Aku. Because of all of this, it takes less energy to “give” and “receive” in the Mount Shasta area... To give and receive anything, be it energy, a message, a knowing, an intuition, an experience, a service or a gift etc. And because of this, Mount Shasta has been a point of contact between people and other worldly/other dimensional beings for as long as humans have existed within her domain. But Mount Shasta is experienced as a dichotomy. You might expect a giving, nourishing, female wellspring to give rise to a landscape that is soft and lush. And yet, her landscape is intense, severe and rough, with hidden pockets of safe and gentle refuge. The smell of ponderosa pines pervades the air. It is hard to find any trace or place of stillness. Keep in mind that the wind can become still. The water can become still. The vegetation can become still. The animals can become still. But that doesn’t mean the energy in a place is still. The energy in Mount Shasta is so active and the vortex is spinning with such force that it is a shock to the senses. I have been “called” to Mount Shasta for two years with ever growing intensity. And that calling grew so strong, I decided to embark on a small pilgrimage. This pilgrimage began with an in-studio podcast appearance on the Digital Social Hour in Las Vegas, Nevada. Where the summer heat is so extreme, it prevents you from breathing a full breath. Then a flight to Reno, over turbulent storms. Then a 4 ½ hour car drive through endless miles of thick pine forest to where Mount Shasta’s imperial heights, erupt from the surrounding landscape. Mount Shasta is like a Disney Land for spiritual seekers. Much to the dismay of the native tribes who see this place not only as their home, but as their cradle of life. The territorial tensions between the natives and the rest of human society is very high in Mount Shasta, somewhat like it is in Hawaii. And over the years, this has created an energetic signature of trespassing at most of the sites. Just as Disney Land offers different rides, Mount Shasta offers different sacred sites, each one offering a different kind of spiritual experience. Places whose intensity has only grown on account of believers journeying there every day for so many years, much like what happens in a church. I took it upon myself to visit each one of them. Places like Heart Lake, McCloud Falls, The Sacramento River Headwaters, Faery Falls, Panther Meadows and others, that are not made known to the seeking public. I had the privilege of swimming and doing 4 re-birthing ceremonies for people in heart lake, which vibrates at the frequency of maternity. It is held safe, like a womb in an embrace of steep granite. I spent 4 days drinking from the headwaters, which is like drinking the breastmilk of earth itself. I was called to Panther Meadows at 3:30 in the morning. And spent several hours there alone (but not completely alone if you know what I mean) before the sun came up. Mount Shasta, this ice capped Volcano, with a glowing white auric field, that is often seen shrouded in a Lenticular Cloud 😉 stands over 14,000 feet. It and the area surrounding it, has been significant in Native American tales, amongst early American explorers, amongst climbers and then to spiritual seekers from around the globe. In 1930, Guy Ballard, a mining engineer and mineral claim hunter who happened to be a student of the occult, told the world of his meeting with Comte de Saint Germain (an 18th century European mystic alchemist turned ascended master) in Panther Meadows, a sacred site high up on Mount Shasta. He became the founder of a spiritual movement called the “I AM” Activity, writing under the pen name Godfre Ray King. And it is his accounts that put Mount Shasta on the map for modern spiritual seekers. Fast forward to today, Mount Shasta has become a kind of Jerusalem for the spiritually inclined. Unlike what Guy Ballard did by detailing to the world exactly what he experienced in Mount Shasta, most especially Panther Meadows, I feel inclined to simply say that I have been to places all over the world that people claim to be “sacred places between worlds”. Many of them are simply places that people have an affinity with and thus ascribe significance to, regardless of their energetic actuality. Panther Meadows on the other hand, is far more than what people say it is. The water from the origin spring in this meadow, is some of the highest vibrational water you will ever see on this earth. And water holds memory. This water, holds memory from long before humans walked this earth. Millions of years’ worth of meetings. Meetings between elements and other elements. Meetings between earth and sky, earth dwellers and extraterrestrial beings, physical beings and nonphysical beings. The dimensional fields in this meadow are blended to such a degree that the senses struggle to distinguish them. It is easier to receive thought there, than it is to create thought. Which makes for what most people would call “a thinnest of veils” between planes of existence. Sacred is an absolute understatement. Here, and in Mount Shasta in general, it is very easy to lose touch with the reality that most physical humans inhabit. To lose touch with this world and this space and this time. Even before having seen these various sites, I could have told you that Mount Shasta easily makes the top of the list of the most spiritual spots on this earth. It is the strongest vortex site I have encountered in physical person to date. It makes the vortexes of Sedona feel like swimming in the shallow end of the pool. And above the steady, wellspring of this mountain, and her inviolable relationship with the cosmos, the spirit of this place is both sensitive and fickle. Its moods change and the energies change in a nano second. And when they do, you cannot ignore them. You must take heed. If it says No, not today, don’t do it that day. If it says come, you come. If it says change your plans, you must change your plans. There are so many elements going into the WHY of these changes and the WHY you must do this or that. Ignoring these shifts in energy, and the messages within these shifts, is like swimming against the current of the Grand Canyon River… You will regret it. So, without further ado, here is the much-awaited energy diagnosis for Mount Shasta. The Dominant Positive Vibration of Mount Shasta is: Ever Giving. This vibration is due to the way this massive vortex spills its energy outward eternally, and as such, is giving itself to anything and everything in its path. This energetic wellspring is like a firehose in that the output is so potent, it reverses depletion. It forces through the delineation of dimensional fields, causing the “veil” between what people call the spirit world and physical world to feel thin. It is VERY easy to utilize this force for materialization and for making contact and for giving what is hard to give here. And as such, non-physical entities can do so with much, much greater ease here. Because this wellspring fills up those who come into contact with it, those who come to call Mount Shasta home, will also spill over and find themselves inclined to give of themselves to others in some way. Mount Shasta is ideal for anyone suffering a dark night of the soul. Each of its sacred sites offer a different kind of medicine. But if I had my wish, Mount Shasta would not be treated like a Spiritual Disney Land in that people go there to see and experience everything they can, even when they are not being directly and specifically called. Rather, they would wait until they are personally “called” to Mount Shasta. And from there, to intuitively feel what site(s) they are being called to and to go there quite intentionally and for some time, even if it means not seeing certain other sites. It is tempting to think that Mount Shasta would be a place full of only the most awake and highest vibe people. But metaphorically speaking, Mount Shasta is a place of all shades. It boasts the entire gambit of what the spiritual aspect of human society has to offer from zealots to those that are open and flexible in their beliefs. From people who are deeply grounded and connected with the world, to those that have completely abandoned all sense of connection with the rest of the world. From people who are profoundly sane to people who have no shred of sanity left. From people who are true masters to those who have crafted a completely false spiritual façade. And unfortunately, when it comes to the dominant negative vibration of Mount Shasta, quite unbelievably, it isn’t of a non-human origin. I say quite unbelievably because there are definitely some non-human entities and energies in Mount Shasta that you would do well to steer clear of. The dominant Negative Vibration of Mount Shasta is: False Ego Death. When we talk of a genuine ego death, what this means is that as a result of becoming more aware and conscious, a person has dis-identified with and integrated a subjective self-identity. Their sense of self which separates them from the greater truth of who they are, dissolves. Thus changing their personality. It is a fundamental transformation of the being, especially with regards to identity. The true ego death is a state of profound objectiveness, connectedness, and ownership of the temporal self. A false ego death on the other hand, is a profound rejection, disconnected dis-identification and abandonment of self. It happens when a person is suffering badly and so, as a feat of spiritual escapism, they abandon the self or should we say the identity that is powerless and suffering and all that was limited and flawed about it. They often perceive that it has simply died. At which point, they then assume/create a new false “transcendent” identity to escape from the rejected self. Often with this, comes a rejection of what it is to be a temporal human in this space and time. False Ego Death is radical dis-ownership. It is a super extreme form of escapism, which goes un-recognized by the self and others because it operates under the guise of being the exact opposite of what it is. The new identity is after all an identity built around being spiritually transcendent and therefore connected to all that is. It is a living, breathing gaslight. And it is tragic. Laying out under the stars in direct contact with the ground, I am embraced in the tender body heat of the people I brought with me on this pilgrimage. The divine sound of their talking and giggling carries up to the milky way, which from here, looks like a streak of blown powdered sugar against a canvass of black. The night sky is a flurry of activity 😉 Tomorrow, I am leaving Mount Shasta because of why I was called here… To re-orient myself back towards people. It is all too tempting when you have been hurt too badly by people, to orient yourself towards connection with the spiritual realms or with animals or with plants. Anything that promises not to hurt so much. But I have come to this life to GO TO and Be WITH the people of earth. And so, I will.

I’ve been trying to put the vase of me back together again. To glue and weld and solder the shards of me back together again. So I can look in the mirror and recognize me. But that will never happen. Life has felled me with a ruining stroke. It does that sometimes. Or should I say, people do that sometimes. They leave you in pieces. They leave you to pick up the pieces of you. Sometimes you can put those pieces back together again. But sometimes, you can’t. Sometimes, not even the greatest puzzle master could. And so, you have the choice… To give up on you or to give up on the form of you. It’s time to stop trying to save the vase of me. I have been felled by a ruining stroke. And so, these shards of me have no other choice than to become something new. By Teal Swan

Emerging from the jet bridge into the terminal at Austin-Bergstrom Airport, it is immediately apparent that Austin, Texas has changed. An assembly of sleek looking young business men in corporate attire type away on their laptop computers and talk on the phone with the same level of intensity as New York stock traders. The scent of their various colognes saturates the air. When I last came to Austin, Texas it was before the entire Covid ‘situation’ changed the world. Austin was the place that all the misfits from the rest of Texas fled to, in order to build a sanctuary for themselves. This was helped by unusually cheap housing prices that followed a housing boom in the 1980s. As well as the University of Texas at Austin drawing the youth, both of which ushered in an eccentric and progressive culture. All this was long before the phrase “Keep Austin Weird” made its debut in popular culture and weirdness became synonymous with the city itself. But now, Austin is weirder than ever. The city still lacks cohesion. But now, there is a palpable collision happening between the unconventional, avant-garde culture and the ambitious business entrepreneur culture. Both of which demand to be catered to in very different ways. And both of which are in a silent competition about what is ‘cool’ and what is not. There is a collision between the small and local, independent businesses and the big and global corporations bent on commercialization. There is a collision between the uber-quirky neighborhoods and the high-rise condos. The prices are being driven up and up, making it ever harder for the very people who make Austin weird, to live here. When Covid created such a flood of migration, Austin, which had long been a city for tech pioneering, became the place of choice for California tech company migration (especially from the Bay Area, including Silicon Valley). And it is the tech giants that are seeking to claim and completely transform Austin. The economy is booming. Yet the qualities that once defined the city are up against serious competition. And are at risk of slipping away. So much so, that the dominant vibration of the city has changed. This means, my energetic diagnosis of Austin, Texas must also change. Now, the dominant negative vibration of the city is: Engrossment. Each person in Austin has both their attention and interest absorbed by something. And that absorption, causes them to be in their own world. Because of it, they come across as deeply distracted. The people of Austin are not present. They are preoccupied, far away and disengaged from what is happening in the current moment (be it a conversation or something that is happening). This is as true of the odd-ball, alternative, hipster crowd as it is of the more mainstream, tech business crowd. It is a strange breed of isolation and narcissism, to be caught up in one’s own world and only the limited interests that belong to it. It is very hard to penetrate people’s little worlds built for one, where nothing outside of their limited interests, matters at all to them. The previous vibration of the city, un-relatability, is adding to this new dominant frequency of engrossment. Because the new business entrepreneurs and forward thinking tech professionals feel just like the eclectic individuals (that used to dominate the city) feel… Like no one understands them. After all, the very reason they are creating so much innovation in their professional fields is because they are off the beaten path. Though the city is still very peculiar, the dominant positive vibration of the city is now: Progression. The city, which is an epicenter for youth, is an absolute genesis ground for new ideas. New products and services and devices and methods and concepts will pour forth from Austin. It is a place for the unusual, the uncommon and the unique. Most especially those things that cause a change from what was to what will be. Austin is not a city that cares for tradition. The people of Austin are not looking backwards at what was. In truth, they are not even very good at looking at what is. Instead, they are looking to what is possible, what can be and what will be. Austin is poised to become a leading force regarding the shaping of the world and therefore of the human experience as part of it. Aside from a whirlwind of in-studio podcasts and a synchronization workshop, my time here has been spent taking early morning runs in the neighborhoods and nature. Because of the overcast, it looks much colder outside than it actually is. Most of the trees are leafless, their crooked branches suspended in the lukewarm air. In ancient Celtic society, there was much talk of “thin places”. Places where the visible, temporal world and invisible, spiritual world were in close proximity and the veil between them was negligible. The Edward’s Plateau, where Austin is Located, is one of these places. The Jumano, Coahuiltecan, Tonkawa, Apache and Comanche peoples, who used to occupy the riverside villages here, knew this. There is so much limestone in this region that to walk on the earth is to be submerged in the frequency of purification. The land upon which Austin was built removes what contaminates you on a physical, emotional and mental level. It pulls from you the things that are blocking your alignment with the non-physical (what most people call the spiritual level). It heals you by purifying you. And if you let that purification happen, you will be renewed. It is not a “light” energy landscape. It is deep and dark and even heavy. There is an above-ground life here and an underground life here. Many lifeforms live exclusively in one or the other. Some traverse both worlds. The cave systems here encourage the conscious and the subconscious to unite. In each and every one of us, there is an underworld… A world of things that are unseen; existing in darkness. Waiting to make their way to the world of light. And this landscape does not allow you to forget it. This underworld is tapping at the floorboards, and it causes the underworld of your own being to stir. The abundance of bat medicine in this area is available as a means of navigating these places of darkness within. This area is home to some of the largest bat colonies in the world. I struggle to sleep at night because I am so sensitive to their stirrings. When a ripple of agitation goes through a colony, that ripple continues out like a shock wave for miles upon miles. It is quieter this time of year, with the migratory bats gone. But the bats that are hibernating, cycle through periods of torpor and arousal. And during that time, when their body temperatures return to normal and they are in arousal, they emit a frequency that causes the nervous system of any animal within range to up-regulate. Because of this, it is very hard to relax in this landscape. I imagine that sometimes, the people that call this region home are hit with a sudden feeling of anxiety because of this. But likely, they have no idea it is being caused by the pulse of the arousal of the bats nearby. There is very little that is normal about Austin. As I write this, I am sitting in a little pocket of peculiarity. A tiny courtyard between Yarrow and Sage (a tiny metaphysical supply store). Bistro Vonish (a monthly supper club, turned edgy vegan food truck) and Zucchini Kill Bakery (a gluten free, vegan bakery that flies right in the face of the girly, wholesome, cute vibe of traditional cupcake culture; with its dark, feminist punk-rock vibe). I am flanked by three black coffins, each with flowers planted in them. On the picnic table in front of me, is an “Annihilation Lime Cupcake” and a “Cream Coffin”. I’d say they have accomplished their non-conformist aim. The expectation of emotional comfort food clashes with the experience of hard-edge flavors and a rough, dark atmosphere. With Punk rock’s violent tempo, shouted lyrics and distorted riffs, you can almost taste the music when you eat them. When all is said and done, this will not be an experience to forget… Punk-rock baked goods.

.embed-container { position: relative; padding-bottom: 56.25%; height: 0; overflow: hidden; max-width: 100%; } .embed-container iframe, .embed-container object, .embed-container embed { position: absolute; top: 0; left: 0; width: 100%; height: 100%; } “Right or wrong, it's very pleasant to break something from time to time.” ― Fyodor Dostoevsky Humanity is in the pressure cooker. From the disparity between income and basic expenses; and other economic issues. To constant conflicts on a global scale and on an interpersonal level. To collapsing relationships and relationship structures. To a world that is ever increasingly oppositional to human health. To the taking in of more information than we are designed to process. To doom scrolling and being constantly bombarded with news of crisis after crisis. To never ending 'need to do' lists. To the stress of being tethered to phones and laptops. To the amount of effort self-control requires. To the increased sense of danger in the world. To the constant connection with people through technology juxtaposed with the lack of in person physical connection. To the complexity of modern life. To the uncertainty and fear people feel about the future. To the pressure that is being put on humanity by the universe at large to create a collective awakening. And people feel like there is no way to actually bring about relief. So many people feel like nothing they have put energy into has worked out. Many more people feel like they are in a rat race that will get them nowhere and therefore keep them in stress and pain. The system feels oppressive. It doesn’t caretake the wellbeing of its people. It takes advantage of the people. It feels like every man for himself in a game designed for failure. There seems to be no way to create improvement. And so, there is a desire for destruction. There is no desire to maintain a system that is against you. We are seeing two classic responses to this. The first is: Shut Down. When this happens, someone stops engaging and wastes their time because there seems to be no point to trying. This is the passive response. The second is: Destruction. This is an active response. When this happens, someone is engaged in damaging and eradicating whatever it is that they perceive to be against them or not working. This feels like relief. The dominant theme for 2024 is: Destruction Lust. To be consumed, even at a subconscious level, with the desire for destruction of that which a person perceives to be against their best interests. In 2024, you will see this urge towards destruction on a microcosmic level in the personal lives of people you know. You will see it in the workplace, especially with employees. You will see it on a macrocosmic level in countries and societies the world over. If you are self-aware, you will catch glimpses of it in yourself. And this destruction lust is likely to determine the fate of global politics. Over the course of history, what you see is that when a society feels frustrated and failed enough by the very society they live in, they tend to elect and/or support a leader that promises to create drastic change and fulfill their destruction lust regarding whatever is causing them that frustration and pain. And these leaders, who are poised to satisfy this destruction lust, are the very ones who instead bring about negative change motivated by self-interest rather than positive change motivated by actual care for the people. These leaders exploit and manipulate the people’s pain and subsequent destruction lust for their own personal agendas. Throughout history, people have fallen into this trap again and again because the relief that destruction promises, blinds them to the consequences. And what it often takes to get elected, is the exact opposite of what the people actually need. Aside from this theme of destruction lust, one of the biggest shadows you will see in people in 2024 is: Endurism. Endurism is when you stay in a situation that is against your best interests and continue to endure it for any number of reasons, rather than create a change so you are not in that situation anymore. In 2024, a lot of this endurism will be because of this perception of powerless, specifically the perception that there is no way to make an improvement. The way out of endurism is to recognize that you are in the pattern of endurism and to see that it isn’t going to get you anywhere. Instead, it will keep you in a holding pattern of pain. Disengage from continuing to do what isn’t working and follow the path of least resistance. Live your life and prioritize according to your values and your joy. And anytime you run into a perceived limitation, start looking for the loopholes and alternatives. In life, every decision that you make and every action that you take is altering and determining your future. This is true on a global level as well regarding the decisions we make as a human society. But every so often, this truth is magnified. And it is definitely magnified in 2024. 2024 is a pivotal year. It is a year which especially dictates our direction and therefore our future. It is a year for decisions. In fact, decisions play such a role in 2024 that it was a contender for the dominant theme. 2024 will be decisions, decisions, decisions; and important ones. Many of you will notice that you are stuck in a holding pattern in your life. The only way out of these holding patterns is to make a decision, rather than to passively wait for something to change. When it comes to making decisions this year, each and every one of us must gather all the information possible, without only seeking information that confirms our biases. We must deeply know our values. We must evaluate each potential decision from the perspective of how we imagine that we will feel about looking back on having made each potential decision after we are dead. And we must become as aware as possible of all the positive and negative consequences of any decision that we make before we make it. With those few big themes out of the way, here are some more themes for 2024. On a lighter note, the shopping experience is changing. With companies all over the globe switching to online sales, with the exception of small boutiques, many physical stores will be shifting their focus entirely towards the in-store experience. Rather than the focus being about selling a product in stores, they will focus on selling their brand, their brand experience, their culture and the specific flavor of social element they want to offer. On top of this, 3-d printing of clothing specifically has the potential to start a revolution in the clothing industry; one that holds the potential to solve the human rights crisis of sweat shops. This is yet another year for medical breakthrough. Again, many of these breakthroughs involve the human genome and the ability to customize medication and medical treatment according to an individual’s genome. There will also be advancements in bio-electrics for things like treating arthritis. And some notable advancements regarding prosthetics. The ability to bring sensation of feeling to prosthetics is chief among them. In 2024, there is a lot of universal buzz around police forces. There will be a lot of confusion and mixed tactics in the police force. Police forces will be adopting technologies and programs and strategies that are in alignment with the idea that they are protectors of the peace and are there for and on the side of the people. While at the very same time, they will continue to militarize, in alignment with the idea that they exist to protect the powers that be against the people and also protect against extremist threats. From local interactions between police officers and civilians to more global terrorist attacks, especially in Europe, the contradictory nature of the police force will be showcased. At the same time, you will see even more of a split regarding the use of AI in predicting and preventing crime. This could lead to a full-blown controversy regarding using AI to identify crime patterns, including locations and people who are likely to commit a crime. The good news is, the expansion path of the entire justice system is in the direction of employing strategies to prevent crime rather than catching and punishing people. Factory farming will take a huge hit in 2024. There will be a number of heart-wrenching and heartwarming stories and scenes regarding animal welfare associated with this. Ultimately, it is going to be a business that is looked back on with horror in future generations. It brings into focus the deep importance of making one’s livelihood in ways that don’t harm others or harm yourself. In 2024, humanity is going to be receiving a huge calling… Our focus must go to the oceans. Humanity is being called upon in a MASSIVE way and on a mass scale to pour our care and focus into the oceans. Our future on earth hangs in the balance of water. This means any action you can take to support the oceans, will make the most difference this year. And this means that global initiatives and agreements that protect the oceans have huge non-physical backing. Also, water is a keeper of memory and information. How we treat the water is a message we are encrypting into the water about us and about our relationship to the earth. When you feel this calling, answer it! The potential for landslides stands out in 2024[1]. This is a year when the potentials for landslide must be recognized, drainage must be improved, slope angles should be reduced, protective berms should be introduced. On top of climate changes, the vibration of insecurity emanating from the lifeforms on earth is like a form of energetic pollution that is causing a destabilization of the surface layer across earth. Taking all this into account, there is a powerful antidote to much of what is happening and what will be happening in 2024. And that is to highlight the best of humanity and the best of the world. In stark contrast to inundation with bad news and our sore spots being used in the game of politics and messages of destruction, we need to consciously celebrate and remind each other of the best of human nature and the best of what happens on earth. This is not something to be done in the name of denying or negating the negative. It is to prevent humanity from losing sight of goodness. Share those inspiring and heartwarming stories. Post those beautiful images that remind people of the magic of life on earth. Commemorate positive events. Restore someone’s faith in humanity. People need to be reminded of the positive potential of us. And the positive potential of life on earth. In 2024 ask yourself each day: How can I highlight the best? Human potential may not always be obvious. And yet, it is always there, ready to be called forth in response to conscious choice. [1] California storm updates: State of emergency in effect as flooding, mudslides hit Southern California

In the early morning, on the beaches of Ladispoli, a line of men come together on the beach while it is still dark, with their fishing poles, rubber boots and buckets. Just as their fathers did and their fathers before them did and their fathers before them did. One morning, I discovered them there when I traded sleep for a run on the beach in the black volcanic sand. It was one of those moments where you step into a completely different life and feel suddenly like an alien setting foot on a foreign land. I ran for half a mile before finding it impossible to resist a swim. And there, unexpectedly on the beaches of the metropolitan area of Rome, I had one of the most magic ‘ocean moments’ in my life. The surf was so gentle, there were no waves. Only textures rippling themselves into existence on the surface of the water, which was the temperature of warm, heated pool water. The water was clear and shallow for meter upon meter and so salty that it held you up gently. It is the safest feeling ocean I’ve ever been in. The full harvest super moon was setting to the West causing striations in the entire horizon line of pastel pink under pastel blue, under cobalt blue. Over the period of a few minutes, as if the horizon bleded into the ocean, the entire surface of the ocean, as far as the eye could see, picked up the color and turned pastel pink, pearlescent and blue. Much like a gasoline stain on a puddle. I watched the last star disappear in the sky. And then, as if I were not already in enough awe, the sun began rising to the East. A brilliant ball of orange-gold light. For a moment, its light crept across the dark sand. But suddenly, the energy and the warm orange light from the sun met with the energy and the cold pastel light of the moon. Instead of either of them cancelling each other out, we found ourselves suspended there in-between these two celestial bodies. Caught in the center of day and night in what felt like a love affair that happens in secret, when most people are still asleep in their beds. As if making passionate love after centuries apart, when the light being cast off from one met with the other, the result was an explosion of two different qualities of light and two polar energies. It was like a scene from what religions promise is waiting in the afterlife. I could not think. I could not breathe under the weight of the surreal beauty. It is a moment I will carry with me for all my life. My guess is that the majority of people who have been to Rome would guess that the dominant negative vibration of Rome is rudeness as the people of Rome can be offensively impolite and ill-mannered and tend to have a brash mannerism. However, the dominant negative vibration of Rome is actually: Chaos. If there was a city that personified the opposite of stillness, it would be Rome. There is a throng and babel to it. Rome is completely and totally overstimulating. But don’t fool yourself, this vibration of chaos isn’t just about the insane traffic or the brash interactions between so many people. Those are just surface symptoms of a deeper kind of chaos. To generalize, the people of Rome have simply succumbed to the fact that their city will be messy. And their minds will be messy. And their plans will be messy. And their emotions will be messy. And their relationships will be messy. And their lives will be a messy display of disorder and confusion. They don’t seem particularly perturbed by the fact that they don’t have their lives together or under any semblance of control. Perhaps because no one else around them does either. I actually find it endearing. But this vibration of chaos leads to things like lack of reliability, soap opera level drama in interpersonal relationships, disastrous administration, a city that is overwhelmed with trash, extreme inefficiency, pedestrian experiences that make it feel as if you were caught in the running of the bulls, traffic insanity, catch 22s everywhere, the inability to get things done (even in a more than reasonable timeframe) and a completely hectic way of being. Because of this chaos, it is very hard to get clear or to ground yourself in Rome. It is also very hard to be centered within yourself, rather than to get lost 'out there' in the external happenings of the environment. Rome would be a very hard place to get your life under control. The dominant positive vibration of Rome is: Spectacle. Rome, personified, is a show off. Rome wants you to come to it. Rome wants to be seen. So many places in this world seek to maintain their magic by staying secret. And by not attracting the mob. With Rome, it is the exact opposite. Rome is a performer, and the world is its stage. Like all true performers, it only thrives when people look at it. It flaunts and boasts and trumpets. It feeds off the admiration. Anything less, would leave it feeling empty and depressed. This vibration is in the landscape itself, which loves and wants people there. This is probably why Rome is such a cradle of human civilization. And it is in the original intention with which the city was built. It was built to be a spectacle and it was meant to impress. And it is in the way the people of Rome love their city and want to show it off. Now what I am about to say will seem like a contradiction unless you consider that inherent contradictions are a common element of chaos. But Romans can have a brash and even rude mannerism and yet at the same time, open up their arms and say “yes” to you. I have never seen more tourists anywhere in my life than at the various attractions in Rome. But instead of feeling invaded, again and again, I observed the people of Rome dawn the attitude of “Yes… Come, come. Of course, you want to see this place! It’s amazing!” The people who call the city home want to be a part of what is happening, and everything that is happening, is happening in Rome. There is a sincere jolliness to the people that is beyond rare to find in areas of such peopled density. Even the chilly eminence of the Vatican gets swallowed up by this busy jolliness. A jolliness is accentuated by the “singy”, up and down notes of the language as it is spoken on the streets. What was fascinating is that despite the absolute chaos of everything in Rome, including the traffic, people have an unspoken attunement to the chaotic surroundings. Unless you can sense this unspoken relationship that they are all having with each other, it makes no sense why everyone isn’t getting into an accident every day. They miss colliding with each other by centimeters. Unlike in other cities with horrendous traffic, where car horns are a literal symphony taking place twenty four hours a day, they dart and merge and weave around each other as if in a state of total acceptance of the fact that the consequence of being in such a happening place, is that people are going to get in their way. They do not know the meaning of stillness or personal space. Which might sound like hell to some people (in fact I observed more than a few total melt downs in people who came to Rome from other cultures because of this fact). But it is a fabulous antidote to boredom, to isolation and to ostracization. Aside from seeking out places away from tourists, so that I could get a good read on the people that call Rome home, I couldn’t resist seeing the Roman Coliseum… one of the seven wonders of the world. Aside from a few spots, there is very little energy left from the original days of the Gladiator. It has dissipated over years and mostly what can be felt today is the thought projections of millions upon millions of people regarding what it must have been like in its day and the things that must have happened there. You can imagine the roar of the audience as if they were sitting there all around you. You can imagine the terror of the people who knew they were going there to die. The agony of the brutality experienced by the animals and slaves. The inflated boost of glory that comes with victory. There is an upside and a downside to this dissipation of energy. The downside is that unlike the amphitheater in Trier Germany (another one of the largest cities that belonged to the Roman Empire) it’s hard to perceive the energetic imprints of the actual past that happened there, which is a deeply visceral experience that is intense. The upside is that it’s hard to perceive the energetic imprints of the actual past that happened there, which were horrors most modern people of today cannot comprehend. And I stood under the famous ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. It was a bizarre experience. Over tourism implies that the actual experience of something is diminished by the amount of tourists that are there. Nowhere is this truer than it is at the Vatican in the Sistine Chapel. Because it is so famous all around the world, you feel like you are about to see something amazing in person that you have only heard tales about. But it was more crowded than Tiananmen Square in China. To even get through the door was a challenge. When we finally did, we had to hold onto each other so as to not be swept away from each other by the crowd. Gendarmerie (essentially the Vatican police) were barking aggressive orders to not stop on the sides of the room. They were herding people out of the room and forcing people who wanted to stop and look up into the very center of the room. Only everyone wanted to stop and look up. And so, I found myself in a mosh pit of people, all of whom were full of disappointment at the experience and all of whom were having an incredibly unpleasant time. It was so crowded and so aggressive and so chaotic that it was not possible to take in the experience at all. You could not really focus or feel any of the art around you or above you, beyond the maddening crowd. The body heat from so many people in such a small place was in and of itself threatening. I took a mental picture in my head before I was promptly spit out of the room. I wish I could have been there when it is possible to really soak it in. I found it sad really. And they definitely don’t show you this harsh reality about seeing the Sistine Chapel on any of the tourist sites. I was struck by the impression that Michelangelo’s paintings are not like paintings at all. They are like sculptures imprinted in 2-D on flat walls. Just the idea of taking on the commission of painting all that detail is overwhelming. It makes you understand why Michelangelo wanted nothing to do with the project when he was asked to take it on. And why he even wrote a poem about his misery whilst doing it. I adored the audience in Rome. From on stage, their enthusiasm felt like playing with a joyful tidal wave. It was just one of those moments of absolute chemistry when the people love you and you love them back. When you know that the longer story of your relationship with each other has just begun. This is how I feel about Rome. Like unexpectedly, some unforeseen fate has found me. I did not expect to fall in love with Rome. But one can never expect the unexpected.

The expression on the faces of the dancers reflects that place where pleasure and pain collide. In a dark, intimate room, they dance as if right on top of you. They dance as if to dishonor the folly of personal space. It is just as Flamenco ought to be danced. Where you can almost taste their sweat. Where you can feel the heat from their bodies and smell their perfume. Where you are hit by the wind from their dresses when they whip the fabric past you. And shocked by the force of the clash of their shoes against the floor. Flamenco is meant to move you and to force polarity upon you. It forces you to feel. There is nothing polite about flamenco. It is a violent display of power and passion and emotion and sex. The first stop on this year’s European tour is Barcelona, Spain. The cosmopolitan capital of the Catalonia region of Spain. On the coast of the Balearic Sea, it is held between the mouths of two rivers and bordered by the Serra de Collserola mountain range. A city famous for its individualism and architecture. Antonio Gaudi, the visionary architect/designer/artist has created the face of Barcelona that is shown to the world. Exquisitely eccentric buildings and parks that look like something from a fantasy world. Including the colorful trencadís mosaics that the rest of the world associates with Barcelona. His masterpiece, the Sagrada Familia, is a colossal church. But to call it a church feels unjust. It is a work of art so detailed and extensive that it exhausts the mind to consider. When Gaudi died in 1926, it was only between 15 and 25 percent complete. And it is still under construction today; aimed at a goal of becoming the tallest church in the world by its completion. Since his death, individuals dedicated to carrying out his vision have taken over the project and the process continues still. The entire building itself is a collage of different forms in stone. Inside, the gradient light streaming through the stained glass creates a green to blue cast on one side and a yellow to red cast on the other. The stonework, embellishments, spires, staircases and pillars make it look like something straight out of the fantasy novel Lord of The Rings. The energy of the place is also a dizzying collage. The ancient and aggressive energy of the Monserrat mountains in the conglomerate stone, the thoughts of millions upon millions of tourists, the personality of the architect himself and those that followed him by taking on the work as their own, the celestial feeling of millions of people going there to touch god, the desperation of people praying for relief from their suffering, a heavy cloud of distrust and suspicion and even disapproval coming from Catholic authorities regarding the building itself, dark and demonic energies most especially around the oldest part of the church, the area where mass is held. There are so many counter forces to the energy of prayer and faith and desire in the place that in extremely rare fashion, I chose not to light a candle, set my intentions or offer up my asking to the greater universe there. Something that I never pass up the opportunity to do inside of churches, where the energy of hundreds (if not thousands) of years’ worth of belief is backing them. Of all the types of architecture I have seen around the world, Spanish architecture is my favorite. The terra cotta clay tile roofs, the stately wooden beams, the thick stucco walls, the soft arches, the carved wooden doors, the warmth of the colors, the way they capture and contain the light of day, the way the structure of them lends itself to fiesta. It is above all a social architecture, the kind that makes you want to throw a party. The view from the hacienda I have rented for myself and my team has a sprawling view of the Mediterranean ocean, California-like hillsides of other estates and houses and an open market full of a vibrant collection of fruits and vegetables. Just like the people of Spain, there is an intensity to the produce. There is an angst and a passionate, almost aggressive energy in the fruits and vegetables here. Because of this intensity, which is grown into them, it would be very hard to make comfort food here. It makes the flavors sharper than usual. It is the makeup of the land itself that makes them this way. The influence of the people growing and handling them adds to it, but could not create such an effect on its own. No matter what food it is, eating the food here stirs you up rather than calms you down. After days of walking through the genial maze of the historic alleyways of Barcelona and traveling outwards to the flanks of the city to find the places where only locals reside, I have decided upon my energy diagnosis for Barcelona. The dominant negative vibration of Barcelona is: Spoliation. Spoliation is the act of ruining or destroying something. It is a term often used when something precious is taken away from a place. Throughout history, Barcelona has been a place too densely populated for so small an area. This fact has created a multitude of problems again and again. And this time, it is related to tourism. Barcelona has a very long history of political unrest tied to its fight for recognition and individualism. In large part because of its political history, since the late 1800s, so many of the people in charge of Barcelona had the intention of it becoming a heavily trafficked European tourist city. This intention came to fruition especially thanks to the World Expositions and the 1992 Olympic Games and the 2004 Forum. As a result, the unique magic of the place was no longer embraced. Instead, it was abandoned in order to make it match the other talked about travel cities of the world. It has catered itself to popularity. And in doing so, lost its richness. To put it bluntly, over-tourism is absolutely ruining Barcelona. The town has been quite literally designed to cover over the rich Catalan culture and history and rather to cater itself to whatever features or spectacles will draw visitation from foreigners. It is so crowded that it is impossible to take in anything of depth or character from the city itself. Barcelona is a display of all the classic symptoms of over tourism. I had to make a serious effort to go find pockets of true Catalan people and culture in order to even feel the consciousness and energy of the people of Barcelona because the city is so full of so many tourists from so many different places in the world, that true Barcelona has been lost underneath it all. To be honest, it kind of broke my heart. It especially broke my heart because the people of this Catalan region have been desperate for the distinction and individuation of their own unique culture and ideals and values and legacy. And instead of Barcelona being a statement of exactly that, it is a statement of the opposite; indeed the loss of that. On an energetic level, it is very hard to feel Barcelona. On an energetic level, Barcelona risks being emptied of its magic. Its vibration is becoming almost whitewashed and bland. Such is the problem with over tourism. Unlike world centers like London, where people from all over the world come to combine their cultures into a rich human display, places of over tourism suffer the fate of having the essence sucked out of them. Tourists don’t come to add anything more than money to a place, they come to take away things, like items and experiences. And it can only be a mutually beneficial exchange if the people in charge of a place know that and never forget it. The dominant positive vibration of Barcelona is: Bravado. To generalize, the people of Barcelona are not afraid of making a bold and showy statement. You see this Bravado holding strong throughout their political history. It is a very bold mannerism that is meant to impress others and even to intimidate others. There is a kind of pride in the Bravado of the people of Barcelona. They are driven, proud people and they are proud of and driven about whatever they associate themselves with. This bravado is behind the architecture and the taking on of a project like the building of the Sagrada Familia. It is behind the idea to bid for the Olympic games. It is behind the decision to solve the burial space issue by creating The Cementiri de Montjuïc. It is the necessary spirit with which to dance the flamenco. It is behind the push for Catalan independence. This bravado is grown into the people. It is an integral part of their speech patterns and mannerisms and movements. As I write this, I am sitting on the beach looking out over vigorous waves curling up and collapsing in on themselves so close to the shoreline, it feels like they are deliberately trying to grab you. To my right, a couple is slow dancing in the golden honey sunlight at the end of day. There is a rich quality of life here. A quality of life that lasts well into the wee hours of the morning. To generalize, the Spaniards keep extremely late hours. As a morning person, my day is soon to be over. But for the people of Barcelona, the day has just begun.

In the very early 1900s, a group of well to do business men in Colorado dreamed of a summer colony… A homestead where good friends and family could enjoy the summers socializing, drinking port, smoking cigars, riding horses, fishing and playing tennis while their children played together, away from the heat of Denver. The Moffat tunnel was under construction and Mr. Skinner (one of the top engineers) was asked to keep a keen eye out for good, settleable land close to the railroad, with views and running water. When this land was found, a timber and land claim was applied for. The land, of several thousand acres, was named Miramonte (which means behold the mountain in Spanish). Soon after, my great grandfather, Robert Graham Bosworth came to the land and wanted a part in this dream. It is a dream that my family is still a part of to this day. Every summer growing up, my parents would put my brother and I in the back seat of the car and drive from Utah to spend some time in this ancestral land called Miramonte. For as long as I can remember, it has been my favorite place in this world. After passing through the gate, you follow a tawny gravel road that winds down through the alpine landscape for an incredible distance. It swings out over outlooks that reveal a breathtaking expanse of mountain ranges, including an unusual mountain that looks like a Saddle. At its foot, a large reservoir gleams in the light of day. You pass by the old doctor’s cabin, which due to years of neglect, is now missing a roof. And by the red barn with its glowing white interior. This is my safe place. Every stall used to be full with horses, whose nickers would fill the place like a heavenly chorus. It is Miramonte tradition to be married in the top of that barn, where the Labor Day square dance is held each year. As you continue down the road, you start to pass large summer cottages, spread out and tucked away into the landscape. There are nine of them in total on the property with a tennis court flanked by ponderosa pines to block the mountain breeze. Every so often, you can hear the far-off deep whistle of a train about to enter the canyon and the deep rumble as it passes through tunnel 23. That sound is one of my favorites. Even as a child, it seemed to stir in me some deep nostalgia from a time before my time. As a part of this ancestral project that I’ve been fixated on, it dawned on me that I have a memory of a giant chest in the particular cottage that I spent time in as a child. I opened that chest many years ago and saw a collection of old black and white photographs in it. So, ever since last December, I’ve been hell bent on making it to Miramonte specifically to bring my son, Winter there to be nourished by his ancestral roots... And to get into that chest. As the land is inaccessible in Winter time, I had to wait until now. I spent three days nose deep in that chest, up to my elbows in the black and white faces of people whose names I have only seen written on my family tree and heard mention about. Days reading through journals and telegraphs and letters written in the 1800s and 1900s. And have come out the other side both awestruck and deeply emotional. I finally got to know my great grandfather. Robert Graham Bosworth was a prominent attorney that was admitted to practice in the U.S. Supreme Court. He had attended Harvard University and Princeton University before practicing law as a partner in the Pershing, Bosworth, Dick and Dawson Law Firm. He spent most of his life as a corporate attorney before becoming a Colorado state senator and the senate majority floor leader. He was drafted into World War I where he was commissioned to be a captain in the United States Army, Field Artillery Division. In 1918, he was the assistant supervisor of instruction at the American Artillery School in Samur France. He commanded the second battalion; 19th field artillery from 1918 to 1919 in Luxembourg. Growing up, knowing nothing more than his professional accolades, I imagined him to be a serious and reserved even emotionally cold man. But in that chest, I found a collection of letters that he had sent to his son (my grandfather who bears his same name) over the years, which brought him to life and completely changed the way that I saw him. He wrote poetry, which it turns out is not something that started with me. He even claimed that “turning a poetic phrase is a Bosworth family tradition” … A tradition my grandfather and father both followed, but neither ever told me about. Robert was a deeply passionate, warm, generous, social and emotionally effusive man. After reading his letters, I felt almost heartbroken to have never known him. Just to give you a taste of his personality, here is just one example of an excerpt from a letter he wrote to my grandfather, whose nickname was “Bob”. All of his letters are like this. But Robert’s life was rocked by a tragedy when he was very young. But to tell you of that tragedy, I have to introduce you to my great, great grandfather Joab Otis Bosworth. Joab was born in Lee County Iowa in 1847. Joab started out as a chemist/pharmacist. And it was Joab that brought my family west to Colorado. Although he was not a trained chemist, he “picked all his knowledge up by dint of hard work and study.” He opened a drug store, which in 1876, he turned into a company called the Denver Fire Clay Company. He supplied Colorado assayers with a variety of products including chemicals, mining equipment and supplies, and clay crucibles. Joab discovered clay deposits and his company went on to become wildly successful. The company's early production was of fire-resistant bricks for the construction of smelters. The company was a prominent American manufacturer, distributor, supplier and importer/exporter for Assayers, Chemists and Laboratories. It had branches in Salt Lake City, Utah, Albuquerque, New Mexico, El Paso, Texas, Boise, Idaho and New York, N.Y. He became the founder and president of and the Denver Natural Gas and Oil Company. And he founded the Colorado Powder Company. Joab was one of the first inventors of flash powder for photography. But it is here that the story turns south. One afternoon in August 1890, while creating a compound used in flash photography, the materials he was working with exploded. And tragically, Joab lost his life. The newspaper articles tell the story in grizzly, Sherlock Holmes style detail. Take this excerpt for example… “Mr. Joab Otis Bosworth, President of the Denver Fire Clay Company was instantly and shockingly killed at one o’clock yesterday afternoon. His charred and mutilated remains were found with his head resting to the East, his feet but a short distance from the counter where he was known to have been standing when the explosion occurred. The body nude, every vestige of clothing having been torn away by the explosion. When the body was tenderly lifted and placed upon a stretcher, it was seen that the right arm had also been blown away. Death had been instantaneous and the force of the concussion so great, that it practically dismembered those positions of the body not immediately touched by the blast. The remaining arm and legs fell off from the body when it was removed at the dead house. The search for other bodies was then continued, but without result.” Though others were injured, Joab was the only one killed in the blast. His wife, Leonora, was left a widow with three boys. Including my great grandfather, who was just three days short of his second birthday when his father died. But his mother obviously brought him up to be a profoundly loving father. When Joab died, she took over the company that he left behind and ran it with her sons when they came of age. Leonora was also deeply devoted to orphans. In fact, she was president of the Denver Orphans’ Home. Perhaps not having a father made my great grandfather more deeply value being a true presence and support in his own children’s lives. The further I walk down this path, the more it makes you wonder just how much free will counts in the story of anyone’s life and just how much each one of us is a pre-determined continuation of all those who came before us. I see so much of myself already written in these people I am only now learning about. From the nutty professor behavior to the entrepreneurial streak to the obsession with horses to the aptitude and penchant for poetry to the quest for achievement to the dream of intentional community, which was dreamed up in my family line far before I ever set foot on this land called Miramonte. In one of the Miramonte cottages, there is a self-playing piano that has a nasty little habit of playing itself; even when no one has turned it on. It gives everyone at Miramonte the creeps, because all of us know that this place is haunted. But I imagine that next time, when I hear its echo, I will feel the pining for those days where this dream of Miramonte felt actualized. Days that I was somehow there for, even though I was not yet born.

“TO COMMEMORATE THAT NOBLE ENTERPRISE THE WHALE FISHERY AND A TRIBUTE OF LASTING RESPECT TO THOSE BOLD AND ENTERPRISING SHIP MASTERS SONS OF SOUTHAMPTON WHO PERILED THEIR LIVES IN A DARING PROFESSION AND PERISHED ON ACTUAL ENCOUNTER WITH THE MONSTERS OF THE DEEP” The Broken Mast Monument watches over the dead of the Oakland Cemetery in Sag Harbor, New York. The name of my 4th Great Grandfather is etched into its grey marble… Charles W. Payne, Master of the ship Fanny, died in the Atlantic Ocean, January 4th, 1838, in the 30th year of his age. Within sight is the colossal grave marker of my 4th Great Grandfather, Captain Benjamin Huntting II. Despite being so deeply connected to animals, for as long as I can remember, I have had an “irrational” fear of whales. It is something that I have always been teased about. Most especially because I have lived nearly my entire life in the Rocky Mountains, thousands and thousands of feet above sea level. I have never had a first-hand traumatic experience with whales. None the less, I often have nightmares about them charging and coming up from underneath me. I have been known to go so far as to say that I would rather swim with a great white shark than a whale… Especially sperm whales. When you don’t know about ancestral trauma, and you have an “irrational” fear like this, you find yourself thinking “Maybe I watched Pinocchio one too many times as a kid”. Or “Maybe whales just represent something big and dark that I am afraid of in my subconscious mind.” I will never forget the day when my parents were over for a visit. The image of a whale came up on a nature documentary that my son was watching. My father saw me cringe at it and he said “Huh… that’s interesting… One of your relatives on my side was a whaler. He was the youngest whaling ship captain in a whaling company. I was in total shock. I said “Excuse me… how is it possible that you are just now telling me this?” He went on to say that growing up, his mother always kept a piece of his scrimshaw on top of her dresser. Some years later, I hired a team of genealogists. And low and behold, the story was even deeper than any of us knew. My fifth great grandfather, Captain Benjamin Huntting I is considered the father of the whaling operations on the East Coast of the United States. He revolutionized the early whaling industry, not of just Long Island, but of the world. He was the first to suggest the use of try-pots onboard ships, which unfortunately greatly increased the efficiency of whaling. It made whalers able to process whale oil out at sea rather than having to bring back barrels of blubber to be processed on land. His son, Captain Benjamin Huntting II (my fourth Great Grandfather) was the youngest captain in the business. The ship he commandeered was the famous ship called the Golconda. The Huntting family held the record for most sponsored whaling ventures out of Long Island. And because whale oil was the fuel source for oil lamps and candles in a time before electricity, and was also used for things like soap and lubrication for machinery, they made an absolute fortune. The bowhead whale and right whale were the ideal targets, because they are slow and docile. But the sperm whale was a whale with the highest abundance of wax esters in its blubber, and it had a reputation for fighting back. At that time, when a whale was spotted, they would send smaller row boats out towards it. The men inside the boat would strike the whale with a harpoon, attached to heavy rope. The whale would then drag the boats (Something they used to call a Nantucket sleighride) until it was too tired, at which point the entire crew would lance the whale to death. If you were in one of these little row boats, and the hunt turned on you, you were powerless against a creature that completely outmatched you. And even if it went “well”, the experience of harvesting a whale, something they call “cutting in” was extremely grizzly and dangerous. My other 4th great grandfather, Captain Charles W. Payne, who is remembered on the famous Broken Mast Monument, died in battle with a whale. Traumas and nightmares involving whales would have made up the bulk of my ancestor’s existence for multiple generations. And here I am, living nowhere near the ocean, with those fears still echoing through my blood. It never ceases to amaze me how ancestral healing occurs, whether we are aware of it or not. At its essence, clearing ancestral trauma is about changing patterns that have been running through family lines for the better. As I write this, I can’t help but think of the image of myself, at four years old in the newspaper. I was sitting on my father’s shoulders, having been taken to a political march specifically for the protection of whales. Just four generations ago, my ancestors were exploiting some of the most sacred animals on earth. And four generations later, totally unaware of that history at the time, there we were, defending them. Without even realizing it, my father and I were clearing ancestral trauma on that day. As an environmentalist and animal rights activist, my father was the progression of his family line. And as a vegan and an animal rights advocate, I am the progression of my family line. These patterns in family lines repeat and repeat until someone in the family line resolves it and changes the pattern. I have returned to the land of my ancestors to do exactly that. An entire branch of my paternal family tree belonged to the sea and sand of Sag Harbor in the Hamptons of New York. I came here bearing 26 names of my direct ancestors that are buried here, knowing that most likely there are many more that I am yet to learn of. Walking down the main street of the town, I feel as though I have been here a thousand times before… As if those who only live on in me, are surveying the town they knew so well, but through my senses; disgruntled about the many changes that they were not consulted on over the last hundred years. But the skeletons of their lives here still stand as landmarks of the town. My fourth Great Grandfather’s house is now the Sag Harbor Whaling Museum. It is as if I remember the weight of the front door. The muted, yellow light coming through the oculus is familiar to me. The fact that it now belongs to someone else, creates an acerbic sadness in me. My 3rd Great Grandfather’s watch case manufacturing factory is now the Watchcase Condominiums. A collection of luxury residences in the historic building, which has been preserved as it was all those years ago. I was not looking for the building. Instead, the building found me. I saw it from afar and felt such pride and fondness when I caught sight of the building, I had an immediate intuition that my ancestors were connected to the place. And as it turns out, I was right. His name was Joseph Fahys. He came from Belfort, Franche-Comte France, to New York to apprentice himself to one of the two first makers of watch cases in the United States. And like so very many men in my father’s line, he became an absolute titan of early American Business. In 1857, Joseph started his company called Joseph Fahys & Co., with several watchcase producing companies in New York and New Jersey. Joseph relocated the original plant to Sag Harbor, Long Island. The business was officially incorporated in 1881, when Joseph went into partnership with his son-in-law, Henry Francis Cook (my Second Great Grandfather who was a manufacturer and financier. He was president of the Montauk Steam Boat Company, The Sag Harbor Real Estate Company and the Sag Harbor Water Company). During this time, the company not only manufactured watchcases but was also the biggest producer of silverware in the United States. Joseph used his influence and success to found the Jewelers Board of Trade in 1884, and was the first president of the Watchcase Manufacturers Association. During the latter part of the 19th Century, the company was the largest manufacturer of gold and silver watch cases in the United States. It was Joseph’s wife (Maria L’Hommedieu Payne) whose father died in battle with a Whale in the Atlantic Ocean. Today, I stand in front of the Fahys family tomb. All his greatness reduced by time to these monuments that remain. And to that which lives on in those of us that sprang forth from him. Right beside it, the grave markers of Henry Francis Cook (my second Great Grandfather). And right beside that, the grave markers of their son and his wife (my great grandparents). And so many other sisters and brothers, aunts and uncles and children. All around me, I am surrounded by the remembrance of the family I always had, but had grown up never knowing. It is a surreal feeling. Like a belonging that is so much a given, it is in your bones. And yet, you can never quite touch it. So many conflicting emotions, it is like a riot in the heart. I wonder how they would feel knowing that their many times great granddaughter would be raised in the wild west, and would one day come to find them. A pleasant breeze moves the tall grasses that frame the beach. There are no cresting waves. Only the motion of sparkling and lapping ocean water. My son, Winter is already swimming with a smile on his face. I brought him on this ancestral voyage to introduce him to his forefathers. Seeing him relish in this re-connection to where he came from is healing in and of itself. While he plays, I introduce myself to the ocean. I ask the ocean for forgiveness for what my forefathers took away. And as the aspect of them that lives on, I pledge to protect it and act as a steward to all those beings within it instead. Living within each and every one of us, is the gift of all of those positive things that are running through our family lines. And also, living within us is the challenge of all of those negative things that are running through our family lines. The question is, will we consciously take advantage of those gifts and will we consciously master those challenges? Standing in this ocean, I look down at my own hand. More than ever before, I can see my parents there. I can see my grandparents and my great grandparents and all of the generations of my ancestors. All of them are alive in this moment. They are once again touching this water that meant so much to them. I am the continuation of each and every one of them.

.embed-container { position: relative; padding-bottom: 56.25%; height: 0; overflow: hidden; max-width: 100%; } .embed-container iframe, .embed-container object, .embed-container embed { position: absolute; top: 0; left: 0; width: 100%; height: 100%; } People will do whatever they can to anchor into predictability. As people, we want to achieve an existence in which we can predict the outcomes as well as the consequences of those outcomes. Predictability is a particularly potent stabilizer and as such, it brings that sense of security that we have all been looking for. Perhaps it is the reason you are reading this right now! But the need for predictability is not actually the need for guarantees. In the game of life, even if there is no way to predict what will happen, we are willing to accept that uncertainty, as long as we believe that our experience will give us a benefit or an advantage. And 2023 brings with it the promise that there is a treasure waiting for us, wrapped up in the things we cannot predict. Exiting 2022, we are exiting an unstable year marked by difficulty, problems and confusion. A year that required us to simplify, lest we drown in complexities too tough to manage. The unpredictability and difficulty of the last few years may have left you uncertain about the intentions you want to set for your life or the choices you want to make or the right actions to take. The people of earth are entering into 2023 with a pervasive lack of clarity, piggybacking on timid inertia. And so much confusion. Because of this, in the beginning of 2023, the themes of drive and desire are up against resistance and each person will be face to face with their own personal definition of drudgery. But the challenge of facing the demon of our own definition of drudgery, is specifically meant to force us to come out of the confusion and to clarify what we are truly passionate about, what really matters to us, what our genuine values are and what we honestly want. Essentially, it has come to clear that confusion and that inertia that we are suffering from. 2023 shows us no more patience regarding us living our life for anything other than what we are truly passionate about. Embracing our passions and designing our life around them is a presiding theme for all people in 2023. Many people on earth are not living according to their actual values. Many people are disciplining themselves to do what is un-inspiring, irksome, boring or menial in pursuit of some reward they hope to gain; or in order to avoid some pain they don’t want to experience. Many people are treating their passions like a side-show in their life. As a result, they don’t feel free. 2023 is a year of liberation. But specifically the liberation of living according to your passion and experiencing fewer obstacles on that path of dedication to what you are truly passionate about. This being said, in 2023, passion, once discovered, meets practicality. 2023 is not a year for the dreamer. It is a year for the doer. 2023 is about how we live both functionally and practically. Once we define our passion and start to live according to it, it is our actions that determine our destiny. One of the lessons of this year is: To take full responsibility is to be the one that has the power. This year asks you to seriously consider and define what, where, how and with whom to invest your energy. There will be a BIG spotlight placed on how you either do or do not align your words with your actions in order for you to actually be in congruence with yourself. From that place, you must be very intentional with what you do with your will power. And it is now that we come to the dominant theme for 2023. We cannot be passive this year when it comes to weeding our way out of the pervading confusion. We can’t wait for clarity to happen to us. We need to put our energy towards it. But the forces that be are not going to stand by passively either. In 2023, you will line up with all kinds of information and experiences that help you to clarify what you are truly passionate about, what really matters to you, what your genuine values are and what you honestly want. The thing is, in one, or in a few, or in all areas of life, most of us are not living lives that are authentic to these things. Most of us are not living the right lives for us individually. And we don’t even have a picture of what the right life would be. For example, we may be working the wrong job, trying to establish the wrong relationship configurations, eating the wrong foods, prioritizing the wrong things, doing the wrong things in order to try to get what we want, living in the wrong place etc. Because of this, to walk a path that represents the full expression of our authenticity, we are in for a plot twist. Plot Twist is the dominant theme for 2023. But you don’t need to panic about the plot twist of 2023 because it is a plot twist that will bring you closer to what you want as an individual. 2023 will be a very intriguing year, which is why I started off this forecast by talking about predictability. A plot twist by definition is not predictable. Things will happen this year in each person’s life that you would never have predicted in a million years. You will make decisions that you would have never in a million years thought that you would make. And you will take actions that you would have never in a million years thought that you would make take. But you can step forward into that uncertainty this year because this year, there is a treasure waiting for you, wrapped up in the things that you cannot predict. This is the case even if the specific plot twist you experience involves fear or pain, or both. The bottom line is, expect a plot twist in your life! 2023 is nothing short of a revolution for the people pleasers of earth. When someone shifts their life into alignment with their own wants, needs, values, priorities, passions and desires, the less they will abandon a sense of themselves for the sake of confluence. One area that will be particularly impacted by this plot twist theme this year will be relationships. Humanity’s progression has been limited by our very rigid and limited mentality about relationships. We are rigid about how relationships should and shouldn’t look. We are rigid about who we should and shouldn’t have them with. We are rigid with our “this is right and this is wrong” mentality about relationships. We are rigid regarding what is possible and impossible in relationships. We are rigid about sticking to our traditional social structures. This rigidity has no place in a world where each individual needs to create a life that is uniquely right for themselves specifically. The rigidity, limitations and closed-mindedness with which we approach relationships does not allow for the creativity required for each individual to be happy in the relationship sector of their unique life. Humanity is being called to do away with the one size fits all approach to relationships. Instead, unconventionality and creativity is the new name of the game. As humanity progresses, the institution of traditional marriage will no longer be the foundation for human social structure on earth. This may be the year that you, yourself step into this creativity and as a result, end up with specific people or in relationships or in social arrangements that you never saw coming. In relationships, the theme for 2023 is defining what you want in each different type of relationship in your life. People will be re-thinking what it means to be a couple or a friend or family. They will be trying to bridge the gap between their individual needs and the demands of their various relationships. And then getting creative enough to actualize what they want. But this will make your relationships look very different than you had previously thought they would look. And it may mean you choosing very different people than you would normally choose to establish relationships with. 2023 demands that you get way outside the relationship box. With our dominant theme out of the way, let’s look at some other things that 2023 will bring, both positive and negative. Knowing that of course there are positives inherent in negatives and negatives inherent in positives. Starting with the more negative, 2023 is a sad year for the environment of earth. You will specifically see themes of deforestation and threats to specific habitats putting several species in peril. The consciousness of several species are flirting with an end to their time on earth. For just a small example, several species of seal are in jeopardy, so is Mahogany, multiple turtle species, the Saola, certain species of leopard, the oak tree that cork comes from, Orangutans, multiple species of crane , Gobi Bears, carnivorous plants such as the Venus Fly Trap and the Green Pitcher Plant, True Toads, Gorillas, Red Sandalwood, multiple species of porpoise, certain antelope species, Polar Bears, multiple species of salamander, tigers, several species of frog, Rhinos, several species of moss, Pandas, certain parrot species, Baobab, Dragon Trees, several species of fungi and quite frankly, we are facing an insect apocalypse. Unfortunately, it is not a year where people will collectively realize the true consequences of this enough to do something genuinely impactful to avert these environmental disasters and the social issues that go hand in hand with them. Despite the fact that the earth has been trying to talk to us about the consequences of our priorities, humanity’s priorities have not shifted. And collectively, humanity’s priorities are not in alignment with the best interest of each other, or the environment itself. Many species of earth will suffer because of this. And you will also see people suffer a great deal around the globe as a result of this too. The place that stands out the most for this kind of human suffering in 2023 is East Africa. Followed by Afghanistan, Syria, Haiti and the Ukraine. For humanity's priorities to shift, things will have to get worse. And so, unfortunately, the consequences of our poor relationship with the earth thus far will be realized later. In line with there needing to be an escalation of consequences in order for humanity to decide to change course, the sad reality is that humanity did not learn the many lessons from the Covid Pandemic. They most especially learned nothing regarding the perception of (and fueling of) separation as well as their narcissistic way of being with regards to that which is “other”. For example, “other people” or “other places” or “other species”. People are sticking with their zero-sum game style of relationship with each other and with other species and the earth itself. And as a result, humanity is lining up with an even harsher wakeup call in the years to come. Two good things on this front however are that the climate tech industry is on the rise. And even though people are not ready to let go of their attachment to the meat packing industry, fur trade (specifically the use of fur in textiles) will be called into question and there is even a potential that there will be bans on it in 2023. Dare to dream! 2023 brings with it solar storms. From human perspective, the sun is volatile this year. Unstable eruptions on the surface of the sun pose an issue for technologies and electronics. And while many people love to say that solar storms have no impact on people because of the protective shield of the earth’s atmosphere, that is not true. Solar storms increase radiation exposure. They severely disrupt the electrophysiology of the body. They negatively impact the autonomic nervous system. They exacerbate chronic diseases. They cause headaches and anxiety. And they cause cardio vascular issues. Also on the health front, because confusion is something that people are struggling with and will be struggling with into 2023, doctors beware, there will be an uptick in issues related to the vestibular system. In much larger numbers, people will be struggling with dizziness, brain fog, vision problems, auditory problems, nausea, fatigue, memory issues, problems concentrating and vertigo. At the political level, 2023 shows a disorganized jockeying for power around the world. Leaders and governing bodies in each country will be vying for this power in the ways that they think will bring them the power. For example, India will be putting the pedal to the metal in digital lending and commerce and they will be walking a tightrope between US and Russia. There will be a leadership crisis and a covert jockeying for control over the EU which will leave the EU without a strong leader, even if there 'technically' is one. Russia will continue to establish powerful world allies through mutually beneficial transaction and are prepared to strongarm those who do not play along. China’s president will try to alter laws so as to stay in power, seeks to establish leadership in the sector of renewable energy and there will be a surge in opportunities for Chinese citizens to learn digital skills, putting them at the advantage globally in an ever increasingly digital age. And in the United States, there will be no end to the fight for democracy and no end to the conflicts around freedoms and identity politics. The Federal Government will be trying to take control of the running of payment systems, further enhancing the civil conflict between people over whether the government should be running payment systems or whether that is a recipe for government monopoly and therefore control. This strategic and increasingly explicit global rivalry for power between the big powers in the world means that the basis of the global economy is a wartime mentality. But in 2023, the people themselves are disillusioned by government and are hesitant to get behind anything or anyone. As a result of not being able to gain the power of the people in terms of what the people are for, you will see leaders trying to rally people based on what they are against. At a macrocosmic level of human society, it’s an “I don’t know what I want, but I know what I don’t want” ideology in 2023. Part of this will be a worker-boss war. Today’s employees have a sketchy relationship with their bosses and this will only increase in 2023 as workers have no interest in giving up their power. As a result, you will see more strikes, more union conflicts, walkouts, long drawn out contract negotiations, job rejections, struggles to find workers and more workplace conflict. It is a bit random, but pregnancy is going to be on the up-tick in 2023. This will of course be seen as a good thing for people who are looking to get pregnant as part of the millennial baby boom. And it indicates some faith in the future is trickling back in. But the reason that I put this one on the negative list is because 1. When more babies are born to a society that is not being conscious of its impact on the environment, it equals even more of a zero-sum game with the rest of earth. And 2. There will be a surge of unwanted pregnancies this year. All this means the abortion controversy will continue to be a potent argument amongst people. And remember how I said that this year the forces that be will be helping you to clarify what you want? Pregnancy has a way of forcing that sudden self-exploration and clarity. After all, pregnancy is one hell of a plot twist. Related to this, 2023 will be a year for humanity to debate over the morality as well as the utopian and dystopian reality of growing human babies in artificial wombs as scientists continue to try to master getting blood-flow to a uterine lining that can be maintained outside the human body. I don't want to frighten people and make them anxious about the year ahead. But in alignment with this plot twist theme, there will also be many surprise and unexpected deaths occurring in people's lives this year. And now, for the positive. In 2023, realism reigns supreme. And not pessimism masquerading as realism. In general, anything that opposes optimism and anything that opposes the pretense of how we think things should be, is usually tagged as pessimism. But realism is not negative. And what is real contains both positive and negative. Realism is to see things how they really are and to present things as they really are. In 2023, people want what is real. Because of this, the trend in social media and marketing will no longer be to present yourself and your life as if it is perfect. Instead, the trend will be: To be real. This makes me very happy because the cultural attachment to pretense is out in 2023. In alignment with this theme, conspicuous consumerism will see a huge decline in popularity in 2023. For those of you that don’t know, conspicuous consumerism is a social trend whereby people show their social status by buying things that are too expensive for people of a lower social status. For example, wearing fur coats or sporting giant diamond engagement rings or driving expensive sports cars or buying designer brands. In 2023, practicality is in fashion and so is practical consumption. People’s buying habits will reflect their practical needs and practical desires rather than their need to publicly display wealth or status. Because of all of this, with optimism out the window, inevitably the fashion regarding what we wear will change. We will most likely be seeing a more utilitarian, protective, practical, durable style to the clothing that we wear. And in stores, don’t be surprised if you start seeing a grunge meets goth meets punk meets dystopian trend. Because the people are feeling disillusioned by governing bodies and are increasingly wary of people who hold unreasonable amounts of power, anyone with a “God Complex” can expect to be put in check this year. Anyone who tries to play god will be met with resistance. People who demonstrate an inflated sense of personal ability, privilege, or infallibility would be wise to come down to earth in 2023. People will demand grounded, responsible, considerate behavior this year. With as much difficulty as the last few years contained, 2022 was a year of illness and poor health for the people of earth. So many people faced serious health crisis. But, as a result of this experience, the collective consciousness around health is increasing. People may still be in the dark about health, but they are interested in their health. They are looking for healthier food. They are wanting to take a preventative approach. They are open to new health alternatives. They are wanting revolutionary products in the sector of health. They are opening up to the idea that what they eat dictates how healthy they are or aren’t. 2023 is a big open door for a health awakening and huge progression in the health sector for the people of earth. As such, 2023 will be a brilliant year for anyone with new products in the business of health, especially if those products are alternative. It is an especially pioneering year for gene modification regarding tissues and its implications regarding reversing disease and restoring youth. Since safety is related to health, the next thing I have to mention is that dependent on funding and citizen support, there is a potential that in 2023, humanity will see the first use of refraction to prevent a populated area from experiencing the damage of earthquakes. Civil engineers are looking to use the principles of acoustics to be able to refract the massive energy of earthquake reverberations and either absorb or send the energy to a specific desired location. Ready for a final one? The process of de-industrialization brought about abandoned warehouses and factories. The Covid pandemic brought about the abandonment of the office-centric workplace. So many commercial buildings and sky scrapers are now empty. At the same time as there is a housing crisis in many cities. Essentially, there is a great need for autonomy and job satisfaction that is not compatible to the office anymore. But at the same time, companies must still find a way to get work done. As a result, the traditional office will be re-imagined. And many of these empty offices will be converted into living spaces to answer to the demand for housing. And 2023 is a big year for this. You will see companies doing all kinds of different things on the path to re-imagining the office from campus style company headquarters that conjoin the home and the work environment. To creative ways to watch employees work remotely. To rented shared office spaces for employees who want the option of an office space. To work spaces in nature. To entirely digital offices. To offices that design spaces specifically to entice employees to come in to a central location etc. In 2023, humanity is re-thinking the workplace. In 2023, there is an unmistakable aura of discovery. It invites you to make the most of the life you have, to live according to your passions and to get creative as hell when it comes to designing a life that is right for you as an individual. And this year remember that there is no passion or merit to be found in settling for a life that is less than you are capable of living.

These tears are like a voiceless drift of petals from some ruptured rose. Innocence is a thing you never knew you had until you lost it. Until the sun is setting over the city that was ours. Like a sunset fighting for its final glaring breath, the memories of us as children, thinking we were grown, burn bright over every inch of this landscape that is giving over to darkness. We reached that milestone that we were always aimed at. But the year that we could finally say that we had been in each other’s lives just as long as we had not been, you dawned a torch and set fire to everything… Every inch of what we spent all those years building. And you said it was because you wanted a “new life”. You told yourself it was justified. And you re-wrote the story of “us”. It is the killing of something so precious that has turned these un-remembered heavens black. But I have not forgotten them. They haunt me in the darkness and I sit by the flicker of the flame that keeps on saying that you’ll come back again, knowing that just like everything else that people have promised me in life, that too may be a lie. We are separated now by a parapet of hatred. And behind that sorrow. And behind that the fear that I cannot live this life without you. Because the truth that is still contained within the pistil of my heart is that you were the lightness of my life.

Hungarian is a caressing language. There is vowel harmony to it. It is syllable timed, fluid and melodic; with many “e” and “sh” sounds. It doesn’t sound like any other language I have heard. One would imagine it to be a blend between alien and elvish. As I walk through Budapest, being stroked by the words that people are speaking, I imagine that Hungarian would be one of the languages that sounds the very best when spoken at a whisper. The Danube River is affecting in its width and strength. It meanders through the landscape, dividing the cities of Buda and Pest. Originally, there were no bridges between the two. But they were joined together in the 1800s and became the capital of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. On the West side of the river, the city of Buda is erected amongst the hills. You can feel its depth in these hills and cliffs and historically rich architecture, including the castle district. It is more residential, quieter, and lends itself to deep reflection. It is imbued with an imperial grandeur that has been lost to time. On the East side of the river, the city of Pest was built on flat terrain. Pest is where the action happens. It is a much larger city, full of entertainment, sites, commerce and industry. It is true city life, Hungarian style. If Buda is all that was savory about the past, Pest is what is alluring about the future. The central area of Budapest is an UNESCO World Heritage Site. Aside from architecture that will take your breath away, Budapest boasts the second largest synagogue and the third largest parliament building in the world. It is absolutely brimful with geothermal springs. An absolutely massive thermal water cave system. It is these thermal springs that bring people from all over the world. The geothermal activity that is inherent to this land, upon which Budapest is built, makes this land particularly sacred. Here, the energy from deep within the earth, rises to the surface of the earth; supercharging the area with vital force. It is a power source and a therapeutic resource for healing. This area of the globe has very special water. I am going to go so far as to say that it is medicinal. But coveted land and coveted resources are a double-edged sword. They invite as much conflict as they offer wonderful things. And Budapest has seen an absolutely dizzying amount of wars. Conquest after conquest after conquest after conquest. More recently in history, the domestic policies originally imposed on Hungary by the USSR, including communism, came to an end in 1989. But the scars of both the rise and the fall of communism are as written into the architecture here as they are into the mentality of the people. For the people of Hungary, communism is a hotly debated topic. Many Hungarians feel that the people struggle more and are worse off now economically speaking than when they were under communism. The struggle and also the poverty is palpable in this country. Many Hungarians cannot afford basic resources. And many young people feel they have no future in this country. So much about Budapest echoes the tragedy of conquest. Taking the ferry upriver, you can see the perfectly preserved white gothic features of Matthias Church, and the Hungarian Parliament Building. And at the same time, dilapidation has ingrained itself into so much of the city. The Hungarians covet and caretake and show off these historic buildings as if they were trophies amongst the debris, proving that there was a time when they were truly great. As the sun sets, sunbeams streak through the clouds directly onto the grandeur of the Castle district. It lights up the entire expanse of the winding river water with a golden glow. And it is like you are peering back through time at that great empire that once was. It is like a scene brought to life straight from the pages of a fantasy novel. The dominant negative vibration of Budapest is: Heart Break. The people here are heartbroken. It is this heartbreak that makes the Hungarians so somber, despite their love and use of humor. Their heartbreak is in the loss of what was. To generalize, they are a past-oriented people. In their hearts, they know that in times past, they were truly great. They had power and glory and good. And it was taken from them. The ironic synchronicity is not lost on me that I am here right now, because the Hungarians were victims of ‘cancellation’ before it was ever a modern term. They were beaten down again and again. They were stripped of their greatness and then prevented from getting it back again. They were set back in such a way that it would be hard for anyone to accept what is. And even harder for anyone to look forward to what positive might be ahead. The Hungarians in general are a disillusioned people. So many of the things that they placed their hope in regarding a better future, turned out to be a letdown. It is a strange feeling being here after being all over the rest of Europe. Honestly, it is somewhat surprising that Hungary is part of the EU, because Hungary feels a bit like “the kid that doesn’t fit into the family”. It feels like Hungary has plenty of enemies and very few friends. I understand now, having finally been amongst them, why I have such a large fan base here. The Hungarian people resonate with me because they are not in an overlay at all about life. They are serious people who are not afraid of looking directly at problems and who are more than willing to admit to what is painful. And they don’t find it hard to find fault with themselves (ie: recognize unhealthy patterns or shadows). They hate vagueness. They have absolutely no time for pretense or for fluffy, abstract, overly positive spirituality. The Hungarians suspect reticent individuals who conceal their internal thoughts and feelings. And they prefer you to give the truth to them straight and hard and give them all the details possible, which happens to be my specialty. The thing about a broken heart is that a heart can be broken, and it still keeps on beating just the same. Even when it feels like it should not be able to. And so, the people here have just kept on going despite. I feel very torn about this because there is so much shadow and light inherent in this way of being. On the one hand, there is a cultural identification here with suffering. People in this culture perceive suffering to be something that imbues a person with a kind of virtue and grace. And as a result, suffering is woven into the core of their positive self-concept. They wear it like a badge of honor. And they keep on going despite this and despite that, even when they shouldn’t. A broken heart does not make a person cheerful. It makes a person lose their stomach for ‘niceties’. It makes them a little bit serious and grouchy and disgruntled. It makes them able to find the bad in very good and therefore pessimistic. And it makes them suspicious until they know you well. Being here, it is obvious that you have to gain a person’s trust. But if you do, their loyalty is there forever and they will be both dependable and honest. It is easy to see that they do not think that one person can replace another and that personal relationships are a kind of social capital here. On the other hand, the Hungarians are very, very special because when a population is beaten down and when their hearts are broken, they often sink into a state of defeat. When you walk amongst the people in such places, there is a high degree of dissociation. And people are almost sleep walking due to a lack of commitment to a life that they did not want in the first place. The Hungarians are a rare exception. To generalize, they are very much alive. And they are very much still determined. They are full of Dignity. And dignity matters a lot to them. Their eyes are very striking. And completely ablaze with spirit, no matter what has happened to them. They are very much committed still to doing the most from where they are, with what they have. Despite being so past-oriented, they are very present and very ‘here’ and they are consistently seeking. Also, they have very little fear of death compared to most people on earth. To generalize, people are so afraid of death, that you can feel it in the background of the consciousness of most populations. Here, it is imperceptible. And this will give the people here a serious advantage because he who is not afraid of death is not afraid to truly live. The dominant positive vibration of Budapest is: Moxie. The people have a force of character, a determination and a nerve that is truly something to behold. With his moxie that they have, they are incredibly resourceful, clever, creative, flexible, adaptable and innovative in their willingness to change and move forward. But they don’t do any of this in a codependent way. In fact, to generalize, the people here are proud, straightforward and headstrong and have very strong opinions that they aren’t afraid to assert. And they argue ALOT. They are absolutely determined people. And they will not hesitate to show their discontent. This moxie is what got them through all the hostilities and tragedies they experienced over the centuries. It is what keeps them going and going, despite a broken heart. I find the Hungarians to be highly talented. They seem to recognize and value talent as well. This, combined with their absolute flair for creativity and improvisation makes it so you would want them with you in a survival situation. They could make something out of nothing. I imagine that there are a disproportionate number of artists, tradesmen and craftsmen here. Hungarians employ direct eye contact with a fervor that is foreign to many other cultures. They will look you straight in the eye and expect you to do the same so as to openly assert your sincerity. It is intense and would be intimidating to people whose characters don’t fall on the assertive side. People coming from a Japanese or Korean culture would find it very hard to deal with. In alignment with this, they prefer meeting face to face and they prefer direct person to person contact rather than any other form of contact. I love this. In fact, a technological takeover would be very slow to set in here. There is not the same separation between people that is so apparent in so many other places in the world; where people stare at their phones rather than talking to the person next to them on the sidewalk. People here seem to grasp that talking to someone via text or on WhatsApp is not a substitute for being with them in the flesh and looking them directly in the eye. In the grocery market here, I found more variations of paprika spice than I’ve ever seen anywhere in the world. I spent a long time holding each packet, trying to discern what made each of them unique. They love their paprika here so much that you can buy it in every single tourist store you pass. In honor of being here, tonight I made a roasted red pepper soup spiced with classic Hungarian style sweet paprika. From this day forward, whenever I use paprika, I will forever think of my time in Hungary… and smile.

Stepping out of the taxi, you are enveloped by that classic London smell. A curry of traffic exhaust fumes, soil, trash, tobacco, rubber and battery acid. The acute busy-ness of the city moves around you as if you were an obstacle to get by. People of every shape and size and color coalesce in this cosmopolitan city. Everyone is speaking English again, but with an accent. Of course, I have to remind myself that here, I am the one with an accent. The sporadic squeal of brakes is its own symphony as the red, double decker buses and black cabs come to curbside, seeking out passengers. There is nothing boring about London. You can never get bored here. From its cosmopolitan social scene to popular landmarks to historical tours to social events to world-class museums to galleries to theatre shows to sporting events to giant food markets, London is nothing short of diverting. London is intense, vibrant, fast paced and busy. Everyone is in a perpetual rush somewhere. People carve out their lives here by finding their part of the city and securing a personal routine. The people they know, the tube route they take, the place they work at, the flat they sleep in, the market they shop at, the pub they drink at, the café they get their coffee at, the park bench they sit on etc. On top of this, every city has its “zones”. But London takes this to a whole new level. Each zone of London (and the neighborhoods that belong to them, such as Soho and Notting Hill and Shoreditch and The Square Mile etc.) is like a different village; the collection of which adds up to one large metropolitan city. And people definitely select and identify with their specific zone and their specific neighborhood. To walk in London is to have one foot in and one foot out of history. The thought form of this city’s rich and very dark history is still so active, it is not actually in the past. Instead, modern life is simply happening like an overlay on top of everything that was. It is a very hard place to be for an extrasensory. For an extrasensory, London is the city of horror. The wailing from the workhouses can still be heard. Gruesome executions can still be seen on a loop on many of the city bridges and in Kennington Common, close to the oval tube station and Lincoln’s Inn fields and Smithfield and Tyburn and Charing Cross and Fetter Lane and Old Bailey Road and Old Palace Yard and on Tower Hill and so many more. The imprints of so many tragedies like the Plague and various battles and the train crash that happened at Harrow and Wealdstone station and the fire that occurred just south of the London Bridge and several World War explosion sites are permanently imprinted into the places where they occurred. So many human remains, many of which date back to the roman empire, populate the grounds beneath London. They excite archaeologists and pose issues for developers. The ebb and flow of the different populations that laid claim to this place and that buried their dead (so many dead) in the soil here, just under the modern pavement you walk on today, means that the city is literally built over the top of bones. London is the city of ghosts. It is haunted AF. So many thousands of years of killings and deaths happening in bad ways… Ways that leave a residual thought form that is very much not at rest. And these thought forms do not dissipate like they should over time. Instead, they are as manifested today as they were at the time of their death. It is as if some other source of energy, such as dark earth from the roman times or clay soils that retain more water (and therefore more memory) is keeping them charged and active. The city’s history, combined with its steam age buildings, ghostly alleyways, still backyard gardens, gloomy weather and ravens picking at things in the dirty streets, gives the fabric of London a definitively spooky vibe. The dominant negative vibration of London is: Pretense. Pretense is a huge issue for the English in general. Pretense is an attempt to make something that is not the case appear true or an attempt to make something that is the case appear untrue. Some examples of pretense are: Pretending to be friends with someone that in reality, you don’t like. Denying that you are upset and saying that everything is fine. Claiming to be an expert in something that you are not. Deliberately leading others to believe your marriage is good, when in fact, your husband or wife is cheating on you and you know it. Or dressing and speaking and acting as if you are a member of the royal court, when in reality, you are a waiter in a restaurant. The people here really struggle with being honest with themselves and honest with others. Pretense is a way of behaving that is intended to deceive others. A person only slips into pretense when they believe that what is true is not acceptable or will prevent them from getting something they want or will lead to some consequence that they think they can’t handle. The process of socialization in childhood is particularly extreme here. The kind of strictness around what is acceptable and proper and what is unacceptable and improper is so intense that as adults, the English are absolutely governed by their shame. This shadow of pretense can lead the people here to behave in a pretentious way. Many people conduct themselves with a borderline snobby assumption of dignity and self-importance. There is an intense jockeying for status in London. Culture in England is hierarchical. It is hardly possible to enter a room without entering into an automatic struggle regarding social position and rank. The shame that makes the English slip into pretense also makes it a challenge to reflect things to them. The English desperately need the medicine of honesty and truth, even if it is improper and even if it is embarrassing and even if it hurts. At some level, they sense that they need it and that it can bring relief. Otherwise, I wouldn’t have such a huge fan base here. But it is not particularly easy to do what I do here. In fact, the first time that I ever came to London and did my first breakdown of London and of English shadows for the people here, it was not received well. Many people could not understand how me doing that was FOR the people of England instead of against them. It was taken by many as an insult. They started to fight against not only my energy diagnosis, but also the idea of doing an energy diagnosis all together. In their mind, the proper thing to do when visiting someone else’s country is to say nothing but good things and be positive about them, even if one has to lie and omit. To generalize, when I try to make the people here aware of a truth that is painful, embarrassing, shameful or improper, they immediately turn against it and try to fight that it isn’t the case. And thus, I have to work through miles of resistance before being able to deal with and provide solutions for what is real. Here, what is real is not ok and therefore, it can’t be acknowledged. The amount of tightness that is built up in the internal system and within a society itself when a person/society spends so much of their time denying what is real and pretending and posturing is unsustainable. It makes social interaction as draining and stressful and therefore unwanted as it is wanted. But it brings people to the breaking point. As a result, in direct defiance of the strict, conservative rules that organize life here, you also see the emergence of a huge counterculture in London. And being here, you start to understand it. When you come to England from somewhere else, and find yourself immersed in the cultural suppression, it is common to become afflicted with a feeling that I like to jokingly call “impulse turrets syndrome”. For example, randomly, while sitting in a calm restaurant, you might get the impulse to topple a table over. Or you may feel the sudden impulse to start screaming. Or you might feel the impulse to just walk over and make out with someone. Essentially, the pressure against all the ‘improper things’ within you, makes them and any impulses associated with them suddenly arise. The dominant positive vibration of London is: World Pulse. Humanity is spread out around the world. When people collect in different places around the world, different cultures arise and these different cultures create their own realities. Visiting them feels like you are stepping into a distinct other world. Each possesses their own distinct ‘flavor’. When you travel to visit these other human worlds, you immerse yourself in them and suddenly, the other cultural worlds you have been to before feel like a memory. Or perhaps a totally different life. Most societies feel like a bubble that is cut off from the rest of human society and from the rest of the world. London is the exact opposite. Close your eyes and imagine that there are Ley lines that connect all of human society around the world. Now picture that the many different cultures (that together add up to humanity) had found a place to settle along these Ley lines. Now imagine London at the center of these Ley lines of humanity. It is connected to every human society. Being in London, you can feel the entire world. And not because it is so diverse. There are cities in the world that are more diverse. It is because it is like a center point for the web of humanity. Anything that happens in London, pulses out to the rest of humanity, especially information. And anything that happens in any other part of the world is felt in London. Walking in this city, you can feel every other part of the human world. Off in the distance, you can feel all the people in the other places like Dubai and New York and Mexico City and Sydney and Sao Palo and Istanbul and Tokyo and Shanghai and Lagos etc. You feel always connected to the rest of the world here. You have your finger on the pulse of the entire world. If you are a person who likes to ‘keep up with human society’, there is no better city in the world. I actually find it surprising that the city of London has been able to maintain such a thick cultural flavor of its own given that it is so connected to every other culture in the world. Coming back to London this time, I am in shock. London is famous for its gardens and parks. A lush, bellicose green made possible only in places like this that are so often held under a blanket of cloud cover and consistent precipitation. Instead of that familiar lush green, right now the grass is the same tawny color that you see when the grass is dried out in the American deserts. The vibrancy has been sucked from the waxy green rose bush leaves and they are wilted. For the first time ever in England, when I went for a walk in the park, each step I took kicked up dry dust. It was surreal and unsettling. London is caught in a sweltering heat wave that has been breaking records and that the vegetation in England is not accustomed to. But so much of London is ever the same. Of all the things about London, its famous street markets are my favorite thing. Today, I let myself get lost in the twists and turns of Borough Market; a quirky food market quivering with energy and life. There has been a market on that site dating all the way past the 12th century. Today, it is a crowded, bustling collection of stalls, each selling a specific gastronomic delight. This one sells vinegars, that one sells preserves, this one sells aged cheese, that one sells Turkish delights this one sells breads that one sells fresh seafood. Gourmet street foods from all over the world are prepared right in front of you, in enormous cast iron skillets and woks. Each item has a story to tell and the vendors are eager to tell it. It is a celebration of food and a showcase of gastronomic excellence. You can go to Borough Market and taste the whole world. And eating there connects you to the places that the food comes from and to the people who made it. The smells of Borough Market assault your senses. A fetid waft of oyster hits you and then a waft of spice and oil from falafel frying and then a waft of slightly skunky, earthy hops from beer being brewed and then a waft of putrid rot from garbage and then a waft of custard that is warm and gentle and sweet. But at a market, you want your senses to be assaulted. You want them to be insulted and delighted. You want the possibilities to overwhelm you. You want to try everything, so as to find those treasures that you will be talking about to all of your friends. There is a place in Borough Market where people take their street food to just sit and eat; on a section of light, wooden stadium style stairs. The pigeons perch on the metal beams overhead there and land to wander through the people, searching for morsels that find their way to the ground. I sat there for a time, listening to the lullaby of their cooing and sharing a ‘build your own cobbler’ with the friends I visited the market with. I watched the people on every side of me in their complete contentment, each eating their chosen delight. Each having nowhere else they would rather be. Ironically, the difference that is inherent in cultural foods erases the differences between people. No matter where people come from, everyone can agree upon good food and everyone can lay aside their quarrels to appreciate it together. The Borough Market is a venue of absolute living beneath the blackened brick of the railway viaducts and iconic art deco meets industrial style architecture. Properly overstimulated, I am now sitting in the little backyard garden of the place I rented here, with ivy climbing the garden walls on all sides of me, sipping from a cup of chamomile tea. Aside from the fact that the garden bench that I am sitting on is dry, it is a decidedly English moment. And I have arrived.

“Just living is not enough," said the butterfly, "one must have sunshine, freedom, and a little flower.” - Hans Christian Anderson A grey sky meets a grey ocean. They are so much the same shade that the early morning swimmers appear to be swimming in the sky instead. Today, the Baltic Sea is licked by winds and it is raining. This is a kind of rain that doesn’t exist anywhere else that I have been. It is a rain so light that it is more like liquid snow. The droplets are not heavy enough to fall fast and they are so tiny, it looks more like static moving downward through the air. In the rest of the world, when you think of Denmark, despite its Viking history, you don’t think of ocean. And you certainly don’t think of beaches where people lie topless or naked in the sand, soaking up the summer sun. And yet, Denmark is almost entirely surrounded by water. The Baltic Sea to the East and the North Sea to the West, which are both inlets for the Atlantic Ocean. In fact, upon coming here, I have learned that Denmark is often referred to as the “Cold Hawaii” because of its incredible surfing conditions. I came to Copenhagen, Denmark to host a synchronization workshop here. Earlier this year, when we did a poll to see what cities the people of Europe most wanted me to make an appearance in, Copenhagen was right near the top of the list. So, despite being fresh out of emergency surgery, I came here and stepped out onto the stage. But not before taking some considerable time to examine this place and its people. I was no more than a few steps out of the airplane upon arrival when a man offered me a sample of a ball of licorice that he was selling and that he was obviously very proud of. So, I took it and ate it, merely as a sign of good will. I walked a hundred more steps past him before realizing that whatever he had given me, was one of the best things I have ever tasted in my life. So, I did what any sensible person would do… I backtracked and bought some for everyone I know to try. Licorice is an interesting flavor. No matter how many times you eat it, it sets in slow and unassuming and simple. Then progressively, your perception of it changes. It becomes complex and overwhelmingly pleasurable. Denmark is to licorice as Switzerland is to chocolate. The Danes are absolutely obsessed with it. This obsession leads them to do things like cover things in salted licorice powder that should never be covered in licorice powder. But it also led them to being able to claim that they make the best licorice candy in the world. Not that they would ever boast about it. The Danes have an extreme aversion to demonstrating self-pride and to talking about one’s own achievements, goals, ambitions, possessions or abilities. Denmark is a small, homogenous culture. The Danes are not unkind or unwelcoming in any way. But it is obvious that they are concerned with negative influences from the outside. And being here around the locals, you can feel the desire to preserve the Danish way or life and the Danish way of doing things. But the Danish way of life and the Danish way of doing things is not in the big things. It’s in the little things, like putting the right combination of toppings on top of one of their traditional open face sandwiches. And like making sure to be rational instead of emotional and to give more than you take. And like riding a bike instead of driving a car. It is always interesting to me how much modern-day culture is influenced by religions of the past. And Denmark is one of the best examples of this. Despite being overwhelmingly atheist in its modern expression, its cultural roots are heavily embedded in the Lutheran religion. And most modern-day citizens have no idea that the Danish cultural values are as Lutheran as they come. The belief that underpins this culture is that God gave free will to man and that it is each man’s duty to exercise his or her free will in the pursuit of holiness. This cultural bedrock has definitively shaped the Danish cultural values. It is introverted, down to earth and marked by profound realism. The Danes value things like reason, rationality, pragmatism, the here and now, responsibility, privacy, equality, quiet, humility, diligence, respect, honesty, punctuality and work-life balance. The mental field is particularly dominant amongst the Danish. It is a culture of the mind as opposed to of the spirit or of emotions or of the physical form. As such, the people here fall into both the positive and negative expressions of being so mentally oriented. They are curious, ever liberal, open-minded thinkers. Hans Christian Anderson (the author of The Little Mermaid, The Ugly Duckling, The Little Match Girl, The Princess and the Pea, and The Snow Queen) is from Denmark. And they are inventors. In fact, Bluetooth, Lego and Insulin were all invented here. Hopefully, this mental aptitude will cause them to be amused by the following energy diagnosis for Copenhagen: As for Copenhagen itself, the dominant negative vibration of the city is: Lackluster. A kind of dullness created by a lack of intensity. I have a feeling that this is a Danish shadow that applies to more than just Copenhagen. What creates this vibration is a society with very sober and socialist values and priorities, managing to control life so as to avoid all things that feel intense. There is very little stress in this society. All the basics are provided… food, shelter, transportation, education, healthcare etc. It is a resource container. Crime is low and nonviolent. In combination all this can lead to the creation of an existence that is inflicted with a kind of perpetual “flatness”. Flatness in people’s personalities, flatness in their life experience. A mundane, normal averageness that is void of excitement and enthusiasm. People are mostly laid back and content. And nothing extreme ever happens. It can be that people are kind of sleep walking through life, forgetting that life is meant to be fully lived and really living implies really feeling and really experiencing; which implies intensity. Many people here are attached to predictability and planning to an extreme level, so that nothing goes “wrong”. Nakedness is something that belongs at the beach… it is not something that applies to exposure of one’s emotions. And this creates an introverted, clean emotional coldness in the social atmosphere. To generalize, the Danes are kind people. Which is why it is so strange that they also have a kind of social shell. A distant, reserved, impersonal demeanor. And as such, it is difficult to become intimate or ‘close’ with them. They are concerned with and respectful of personal space and with minding their own business. Denmark would be one of the hardest places to make new friends. As we would say in America, they are a “hard nut to crack”. When I am here, I feel the urge to walk around shaking people and giving them “noogies” (affectionately grinding the top of a person’s head and messing up their hair with your knuckles) so as to try to break through the unbearable, un-reactive social stiffness. The dominant positive vibration of Copenhagen is: Soft Power. Soft power is bringing about the outcomes you want by persuading and building relationships that invite collaboration and cooperation. And the people of Copenhagen are masters at it. They co-opt rather than to coerce. Soft Power is the art of diplomacy, constructive agreement, negotiation and building trust. To achieve this, a person has to learn how to think and communicate so as to get other people to choose to be on board in pursuit of a goal. When someone uses soft power, they shape the preferences of others through appeal and attraction and information. Developing expertise, skill, credibility and competence are important elements of Soft Power. There must be reciprocity for power to be soft. This being the dominant positive vibration, what it means is that the people here do what it takes to build trust. They find solutions that are mutually beneficial. They create opportunities that are useful to one another. They define a problem and bring attention to solutions in a way that attracts supporters to the cause. They put forth patient and consistent effort towards their goals. They discuss and negotiate and make others think instead of resorting to the hard power strategy of controlling others and imposing their will on others with ‘carrots and sticks’. And they employ a huge degree of respect. It is important to know that respect is the vibrational runner up for the positive vibration of Copenhagen. In alignment with this tendency towards soft power, there is a flat power structure in Denmark. It is not palpably hierarchical. The people here tend to omit last names and titles entirely, which is fascinating because this is a country that still possesses a Danish monarchy. Soft Power is often not perceived as power at all. Therefore, this dominant positive vibration is very easy to underestimate, if not overlook entirely. But the Danes understand that the hard power that is exerted by so many other people of the world is not a long-term solution. They understand that people don’t like being controlled. That hard power often gives a false sense of control. They understand that exerting one’s will over others invites them to resist, evade and fake compliance by breaking the rules secretly and in creative ways. And most of all, they understand that hard power comes with the shadow of corruption. Here in Denmark, there is a serenity and a peace and a relaxed order that is rare to behold in a place where human beings congregate. Because of their commitment to honesty, they are straightforward people. To generalize, they believe in the companies they buy from, they believe in their government and they believe in each other. They believe that others are what they seem to be. They trust the people around them to be both decent and good. And as a result of this, they trust. They trust to a level that makes those of us that aren’t Danish nervous. They often leave their doors unlocked. And it is common to see baby strollers outside of a store with babies asleep in them without a parent to be seen. With this high degree of trust, there is no reason to fear. In this way, trust makes the need for control vanish. And when control vanishes, you are left with energy to put towards other things. Things that feel good. It is this trust people enjoy, in conjunction with the fact that people’s basic needs are covered here, in conjunction with the values that the people here hold (and therefore prioritize their life according to) that makes Denmark consistently rank as one of the world’s happiest countries. But mental illness is a genuine struggle here. And any time there is pressure to feel good, like there is in Denmark, feeling bad can be an intensely isolating experience. According to statistics, one in five Danes will experience a mental health crisis in a given year. There is a high degree of emotional neglect that the people struggle from. And this is not helped by the fact that in the winters, the daylight hours are so incredibly short. And even though there are daylight hours, there is hardly any sun. Instead, it is dismal, grey, dark and cold. Which is not conducive to human health. Of course the Danes love to counter this by saying: “There’s no such thing as bad weather, only bad clothing”. Speaking of trust, upon arrival to the seaside Air B and B we rented here in Copenhagen, we were surprised to find a little note that said: Welcome to our home, we hope you enjoy the visit, please feed the cat. Before coming here, we had not been told that there would be a resident cat in the house. It was unthinkable that someone would trust a beloved pet to strangers. But because of that blind trust, I have been savoring the complete pleasure of having a cuddly, long haired, ticked tabby cat purring on my lap whenever I sit down for the last four days. These moments with the cat and these moments where I have been topless in the sun with the Baltic Ocean lapping the shore, are the epitome of the Danish word Hygge (pronounced Hue-Gah). Hygge is an experience… A feeling experience. And the Danes value whatever brings about that experience. It is a felt-experience that occurs when you enjoy the special appeal of simple, pleasurable, especially cozy moments when everything just feels right in the here and now and you feel safe, warm and happy. Hygge is traditionally attributed to the Scandinavian experience of finding warmth and shelter and food after a long day out working in the freezing cold. However, Hygge applies to all kinds of simple pleasures, not just to those attributed to the winter time. For example, it might be in that moment when the summer temperature at night is perfect and you are lying in bed with the city lights sparkling off in the distance, while reading a book to your child after all the tasks are done and everyone is taken care of. Or it may be on that cold winter day, when you are snuggled up in a blanket with the fire crackling in the background, holding a warm cup of tea and watching the snow fall outside the window while you are socializing with all of your closest friends. Hygge is a kind of art form relative to living. These simple moments of complete pleasure in presence in the here and now. A sense of fulfillment and wellbeing. The Danes know how to see the special in the ordinary and indulge in the simple pleasures that are all around them. To turn things astrological, Hygge would be the mastery and value system of the Taurus. It makes life in Denmark simple and down to earth, a place where pleasure is found in the little things, like the flicker of candle light; which can be seen in homes here year-round. Or in the multitude of different ways that they have come up with to eat carrots. It is a place where people believe fully in the idea that work is not life. And as such, there must be a work-life balance. The Danes have some serious medicine to share with the rest of the human race. From their mastery of soft power to their exemplary licorice to their understanding of Hygge. I have taken in this medicine for a week now. And I believe their famous writer, Hans Christian Anderson, put it so well… “The whole world is a series of miracles, but we're so used to them we call them ordinary things.”

For as long as I can remember, menses has been a time of torment. There was never a painless cycle in my life. I was 15 years old (the same year that I started my period) when I was first diagnosed with acute endometriosis. I was 20 years old when the doctors started talking about hysterectomy. For those of you that understand the mind-body connection, this will not come as a surprise because of my history of sexual abuse. And it will not come as a surprise because I grew up in a cowboy culture in the Western United States where it was better to not be born a girl in the first place. Menses was never a time of sacred feminine power, of renewal and of introspection. Instead, it was re-traumatizing. Every month, the kind of pain and bleeding that induces delirium and sweats and nausea and an immune system nose dive that no amount of medication (alternative or mainstream) could relieve. I spent 22 years exhausting all options for resolution from acupuncture to laparoscopic surgery to energy work to traveling to find herbal "cures" from all over the globe to insane diets to hormone therapies to electric devices that prevent pain signals from going to the spinal cord etc. Until I spent an entire year in a women’s circle doing feminine processes and shadow work with this as my primary focus relative to personal expansion and healing. When you look at a problem square in the face, dissecting every layer that goes into it, it is no longer a mystery why you have had no success solving it before. When I did this, every layer of the problem and every solution that it pointed to, led to the same thing. In order to heal my womb, I would have to change my life. I would have to change it so that I could finally be in conditions that were conducive to femininity. It sounds straightforward at face value. Until you realize that the entire life I currently lead is not conducive to femininity; most especially my career. And so, I found myself at a crossroads. All core health crises are like that. They put you in a choice point. This entire story could be the length of a bible or longer. But here is a summary. I have spent my entire life trying to straddle two roads. Each road leading to two separate futures I have dreamed of. The left-hand path which is in alignment with my feminine needs. A path of a woman, a wife and a mother. To give you an image of what I mean, on this left-hand path, I have married a man because I am in love with him. It is a man who contains and provides and protects and in response, I am feminine and soft and nurturing. My life is smaller than it is now, but it is both warmer and sweeter. Because of all of this, I can blossom and my womb wants to bring forth new life. And on the other side, the right-hand path, which is all about my purpose. The deep knowing of what I am and of what I am meant to be in this life. Destiny. The pursuit of achievement. To give you an image of what I mean, on this right-hand path, I am on stages across the world. I am a leader. I belong to the world instead of to a traditional family. I have chosen the people that I keep around me according to the needs of this purpose. My partner possesses entirely different qualities than the other man would. My life is very, very large. But it is a path that is much harder. For years, I did what any woman would. I tried to have both lives. But what no woman wants to admit to is that if you choose to have both, you must have less of each than you could achieve by committing all of your energy to one of them. If you are going to dedicate yourself to career life and to family life, you will have both. But less of both. For some people, that is right. For some people, a degree of both is exactly what they want. But the more successful I became and the more dedicated I became to my purpose, the more I suffered. Because the reality is that we live in a world made for men by men. A place not conducive to femininity, most especially if you are in pursuit of greatness. The choices I needed to make to continue to expand down the right-hand path, were completely juxtaposed to my femininity. And so, I had a choice to make. Was I going to choose a different life? Was I going to do what it takes to my life so I could experience what I knew would heal my womb? Consider what the impact of me making that choice would be on you. And the hypocrisy of thinking I should choose any differently, while at the same time benefitting from the content I produce on the right-hand path. The day I made my decision, the decision to choose the right-hand path, I went on a walk in the snow. I passed a dead fox (my spirit animal). It was an omen that a part of me would die. In February of this year, both the feminine and masculine polarity within me dissipated. Each offered those qualities of itself that could stay with this incarnation in this life and on this path I have chosen. I laid the dream of the alternative future I could have had on the left-hand path to rest. And I did so knowing that by choosing this path consciously, the very problem with my womb that I had been desperate to solve for 22 years would get worse. I did so knowing that it meant that I would have no more children. I did not play a zero-sum game when I did this. All parts of me found alignment before I moved forward, including my own womb. And I decided to take a step that I would not recommend for women in general to take. As a result of this extreme process of integration, on March 24th, I had a hysterectomy. It was one of the most physically and emotionally painful experiences of my entire life. It was also one of the most significant chapters of “The Making of Teal Swan”. I arrived at the decision to go through with hysterectomy on a spiritual, mental and emotional level. But at the time of surgery, to the total surprise of the surgeon, the endometriosis (which extended all the way up onto my diaphragm) was not my only issue. As it turns out, I had ascending salpingitis that had created 3 fallopian tube cysts. The surgery was medically necessary. There were so many poetic synchronicities that occurred during that experience. Things like the surgery taking place in a city called Phoenix, which is the symbol for personal re-birth. And opening the door to the home in Phoenix (the home that we rented during the procedure) to find it completely decorated with paintings and images of Frida Kahlo, whose own womb was impaled by an iron handrail in a bus accident. To a visitation by a scarlet red cardinal; the symbol of a departed loved one coming to visit you. I was not even remotely healed from this first surgery when the Deep End TV series was released. And the amount of pressure and pain and stress that slam series caused is worthy of its own novel. But that’s one of the terrible things about the elements of the right-hand path. It has no respect for what is good for you or whether you are healed or not. In fact, your adversaries prefer you to be vulnerable. Despite all of this, I decided to go through with the planned European Tour. After Basel in Switzerland and Prague in The Czech Republic, my manager Matthias decided to take myself and the team to see his old homeland. We took a detour on our way to Budapest, Hungary and rented a house in Schliersee, Germany. And the day after we arrived, misfortune struck again. I experienced a rare complication called a cuff evisceration and dehiscence, where the suture line they make at the time of a hysterectomy tears open, and the intestine protrudes through the tear; which is a serious medical emergency. I was taken to the hospital and within the hour, I was back under the knife. All my newly healed abdominal laparoscopic scars had to be cut through all over again. Everything had to be put back into place. And I had to be completely re-stitched and then put on intravenous antibiotics for several days. As a result, instead of being on stage in Budapest, I found myself in a hospital bed in Germany. The German doctors and nurses were both exceptional in their craft and also caring. Still, there was nothing empowered about this dehiscence experience. It was incredibly traumatizing. It was the kind of experience that makes you insecure about your own body and its ability to heal right. It makes you feel as fragile as tissue paper and adds even more pressure to what can’t take any more pressure to begin with. Now, I am back at square one and I have to attempt the healing process all over again, which is very hard to accept. But there is no other choice than to accept it. And commit myself to the process all over again. For I have chosen the right-hand path. It seems only fitting to end this blog with the poem I wrote about my hysterectomy, on the day that the cardinal visited me... The Death and The Bloom Maybe you were asking in the way you cried, where it has gone to, where it has been. Sometimes a flower cannot bloom for lack of adequate light. All its sweetness all its luster all its feminine warmth will never burgeon to be seen. The question is... when the unrelenting grasp of that darkness quells its hope for life, where does that latent flower go? Maybe you were asking in the way you cried, where I have gone to, where I have been. The answer is... I am all around you. Death can have no edict where energy can neither be created nor destroyed. I am converted. So do not stand at my grave and weep. Faith is a thing with feathers. It sings at the break of day. It finally flies free. And I am a bird now.

Maybe you were asking in the way you cried, where it has gone to, where it has been. Sometimes a flower cannot bloom for lack of adequate light. All its sweetness all its luster all its feminine warmth will never burgeon to be seen. The question is... when the unrelenting grasp of that darkness quells its hope for life, where does that latent flower go? Maybe you were asking in the way you cried, where I have gone to, where I have been. The answer is... I am all around you. Death can have no edict where energy can neither be created nor destroyed. I am converted. So do not stand at my grave and weep. Faith is a thing with feathers. It sings at the break of day. It finally flies free. And I am a bird now. By Teal Swan

The town is held tight, like the contents of a taco, between steep granite and sand stone mountain slopes. The divine pressure of the mountains hugs you. Old Victorian style mountain cottages are clutched in the grip of Winter. They flank a main street that stands as a relic of the 1800s wild west. In Southwestern Colorado, Telluride used to be an old mining camp that due to its isolated location, was settled slowly. The weathered ruins of the old mining operations dot the forested hillsides of the box canyon it calls home. Like so many old mining towns in the western United States, the old mines were shuttered in favor of an even better financial prospect: Snow. Telluride is famous for its ski slopes. The San Juan mountains offer snow the texture of marshmallow cream, uncrowded slopes, and terrain that will take your breath away. I have felt spiritually called to Telluride and to Ouray (nearby) for months now. And so, I have come. Now, scouting out the town, I can hear the croaking calls of ravens boomerang against the walls of these mountains. They land on the sidewalks, looking for morsels discarded by tourists walking from store to store. Their oil black feathers provide a stark contrast to the powder white snow. The raven is the bird of prophecy. It leads you to what you do not yet know... To what is still in the shadows of your own awareness. The raven appears when it is time for a change in your life. It tells of an impending change that is instrumental regarding your future. As a keeper of secrets and an intermediary between worlds, the raven is a messenger sent to you… A guide. I followed one of the ravens to a small natural apothecary shop and there I found a heart medicine that I haven’t seen since I was in China years ago. A medicine to heal the emotional root of chronic distress. It is time to work with it again. The dominant negative vibration of Telluride is: Snobbery. A snob is a person who sees their tastes, perspectives, opinions, and way of being as far superior to others. Snobbery often comes with an air of condescension and of looking down on others who do not conform to those same tastes, perspectives, opinions, and ways of being. It might surprise the people who call Telluride home that snobbery is the dominant negative vibration, because people so often associate snobbery with people who see themselves as superior due to social position, class, wealth and rank. And Telluride is ostentatiously against that. The people of Telluride pride themselves on NOT being ritzy and pretentious. In many ways, it is the “Anti-Aspen”. It even boasts a super cool outdoor “free box”. A wall of cubbies, where the locals recycle everything from clothing to utensils to books etc. The snobbery in Telluride is definitely a different breed of snobbery. The people of Telluride end up in such an isolated location by chasing a stranger, more off the grid vision of how life should be. They are very principled people. They have a very strong idea of how things should be and how things shouldn’t be. The idea that certain things are just inferior, wrong and bad, and that anyone who does those things (or worse values those things) deserves criticism and rejection is palpable in the social atmosphere. There is a thick energy of “I’m going to just assume you think like me and have the same views and values as me and share the same tastes, because if you don’t, you’re an idiot and I don’t want you here". It’s almost an “antisocial – social” social scene. Telluride is, despite its branding, a very wealthy town that is centered around expensive real estate and the luxury of outdoor activities; skiing first and foremost, which is still a sport that predominantly only the rich can afford. And so, it is rather ironic that so many people in Telluride reject the valuing of wealth, but from an upper-class position in life. Many of the people of Telluride do not realize that they are well off enough to have the luxury to not value wealth. There is an inherent irony in their moral posturing. The dominant positive vibration of Telluride is: “Off the Beaten Path”. The people of Telluride are a different breed. They come so far away from what is popular and normal, chasing a vision or a principle that governs their lives. They were looking to create a very different and unique life for themselves. They came in pursuit of something both unique and atypical. And they have found it. Very different people, who were all searching for a similar thing, found and identified this place as their place to actualize that thing. In this way, Telluride has stayed true to its frontier roots. To step off the beaten path requires bravery. It requires risk. It requires the willingness to deviate from the collective. It requires doing something different. It requires following your own internal north star with enough conviction that you are not deterred. In this way, the people of Telluride are like modern day pioneers. Because Telluride is so off the beaten path, it is a self-contained dichotomy. It is one of the most famous ski towns in the world and yet, it feels un-discovered. Telluride is a very special place. The two distinct towns that make up Telluride (Telluride proper and the Mountain Village) are both fully connected to the ski slopes, as if the ski slopes were stationary rivers, feeding life between them both. The gondola travels above those white rivers, taking people back and forth between the two municipalities, allowing them to find entertainment, dine, shop and sleep in either. It also has a much-deserved reputation for its food. Given that my diet is vegan, sugar free and lectin free, I could not eat at any of the restaurants in town. But that did not stop me from checking out the food. And I can assure you that it was a torment! No one has to settle for mediocre food in Telluride, no matter their budget. I think it might just be one of the best foodie towns in the United States; a jamboree of epicurean delight, made even more quenching by the contrast of the cold weather. Isolated and held by steep alpine mountains, the snow touched by the creamy light of street lamps and Christmas lights, Telluride is a great stage for romance. Walking the Telluride River Trail, people new to skiing pass by, gingerly navigating the path in their ski boots. You have to be cautious so as to not be smacked by the skis they are carrying when they pass by. And I love it. They are getting a taste of a special heaven that I have tasted so much of in my lifetime. A heaven that I would wish for all people to see at least once. I gave away a part of my soul to the snow-covered mountains a long, long time ago and willingly. I belong to them like a fish belongs to the ocean. I am at home in them, like an oyster in his shell. They are another world within this world. A world of epic, atmospheric depth and beauty. Sometimes I like to ask people the question: If you died, what would you tell a new soul coming into this world that they absolutely have to experience. My answer is: The snow-covered mountains.

Every year life for people within society is getting more and more complicated. There is a beauty and an intrigue to complexity. But too much complexity and complication does not lead to more fulfilling or to happier lives. Instead, it leads to distress. And as such, we see the distress levels within humanity climbing towards the breaking point. To generalize, humanity is waiting for the light at the end of the tunnel. That light of course being a moment when they are finally relieved of the ever-mounting pressure. In the year 2022, the world is still in total flux. What has happened in 2020 and 2021 will bleed into 2022. 2022 does not exist independent of previous years. This means a lot will carry over from the previous years. And 2022 will also carry on into the coming years. This is because we are in a several year cycle of evolutionary change relative to societal structure. This is an era where sub-cultures will pop up and the new societal structure will be born out of those subcultures. You don’t need me to tell you that this is an especially real and an especially intense time period. 2022 is a year where both bypassing and denial will be harder to maintain as a method of coping than ever before. Many will find it impossible. All forces will be united against it this year. In fact, all coping mechanisms will be hard if not impossible to maintain. A human being cannot thrive in an atmosphere of stress. When a human being goes into a state of distress, his or her wellbeing immediately declines. And so, it is only natural that we should want to make a change to the situation as fast as we possibly can. But when we perceive that the situation that is causing us distress cannot be changed, we believe ourselves to be unable to eradicate the stressor. We then find ways to manage it, deal with it and adapt to it. We begin to ‘cope’. To cope is to make a specific alteration mentally, emotionally or physically so that you can manage or adapt to something that is causing you stress. And a coping mechanism is a specific procedure, process or technique, which manages or creates adaptation to stress. However, there are some huge problems with coping. One of these problems is that the very coping mechanisms that we think are benefitting us, may in fact be the very things that are hurting us and also the people around us. Our methods of coping often become the thing that holds us apart from our personal growth and wellbeing. And another problem is that we often decide to cope instead of to make an actual change to the stressor in situations where it is well within our power to do so. It is a huge problem when we do have the power to diminish or eradicate the stressor, but we choose to cope with it instead. And people have been developing coping mechanisms to exist in a profoundly unhealthy and distressing society rather than actually changing society to be conducive to human health and wellbeing for far, far too long. In alignment with this reality, in 2022 all forces are in favor of breaking your coping mechanisms, including addictions. Many of you who have been trying to stop an addiction will find that this year is your year. They just won’t work anymore. Mass amounts of people will come into the ‘reality’ of things. You will be forced to look at and acknowledge and accept and feel and take action relative to those things that you have been not been looking at. But there will be a lot of “aha” moments as a result of this looking! People are trapped in a kind of vicious cycle. The sheer complexity of our individual lives makes it so that most people are so overwhelmed and stressed out, managing the multitude of interconnected elements of their lives, that they are stretched to the limit. There is no space to work on changing the elements of society that are not working. For example, when you are stretched to the max working an 8 hour day and making sure the taxes are done and that there are groceries in the fridge and that you manage each monthly subscription that you now have and that you remember every password to every account and that the pets are cared for and that the kids have everything they need and that they get where they need to go and that each of the bills are paid and that the car maintenance and registration is done, and that your insurance is up to date, and to navigate through the flood of offers you keep getting in the mail and online and that your house is clean and kept and that you are keeping the people in your life happy by managing your relationships with each one of them... you are too overwhelmed and too depleted to focus on things like getting homeless people off the street or on community garden projects or on re-structuring the education system. When people are drowning in their own lives, how much can they consider taking on the task of changing what doesn't work about society? It is with this in mind that I introduce to you the dominant theme for the year 2022: To Simplify. As people are being pushed to the distress/overwhelm breaking point, you will see this move towards simplification happening naturally out of sheer necessity. To be in alignment with all the elements of the year 2022, people need to embrace this theme proactively. And so do businesses. This means simplify your life. At its essence, to simplify is to strip away the nonessential; so as to be able to put your focus, time, energy and action on the things that matter the very most to you. To do this, you must re-evaluate your life. You must re-prioritize. You must let go of things. You must organize your time and space. And you must actively make space. Simplicity is about truth and simplicity is about values. There can be nothing artificial about simplification because in order to simplify, you have to be completely honest with yourself and others about what your values really are and how those values are prioritized. No person can tell you what your values should be. Because no one can tell you what should be most important to you. There are no “shoulds” when it comes to personal values. Each person must admit to what is most important to them specifically and why. Simplicity leads to a sense of freedom. The frantic rush to manage and keep up with complexity makes life become a ‘have to’. The constriction of the overwhelm and the compression of there being no space in your life makes life feel constrained. It leaves you without breath. Simplicity lifts and clears that sense of subjection. In order to simplify this year, consider things like: How you can simplify and de-clutter relative to the physical things in your life and your physical space? What can you let go of? What can you clean out and organize? What do you no longer need? Do you need to downscale or downsize? Can you challenge yourself to only buying necessities rather than accumulating? How can you simplify relative to your relationships? Which relationships and people do you really want and need to put your focus and energy into? Are there any people that you need to pull your focus and energy away from? Do you need to un-plug from your phone, computer and social media to any degree? Do you need to make fewer commitments? Is there anything you need to say no to? How can you simplify your financial life? Do you need to consolidate anything? Do you need to sell anything? How can you simplify relative to your time? How can you do things slowly instead of in a rush? Can you focus on a single task rather than multi-tasking? How might you take things off of your to-do list all together? Are you using your time efficiently? Are you dedicating your time to the things that matter most to you? Can you create systems and routines? How can you simplify your mental space? Do you need to do meditations to stop your incessant thought? Do you need to deliberately put your focus on a specific task or to learning something or to reading rather than letting your mind run zig-zag? How can you make your life more manageable? How can you clear things out of the way, so you can act fast? How can you base your joy and happiness in the little and the simple things in life? In the year 2022 think LESS instead of more. 2022 is also a year for clearing up your karma. To clear up one’s karma is an important aspect of simplifying. Karma is like baggage that you carry around with you, complicating your life on an energetic level. This means, if you know you messed something up, go re-do it or clean it up. If you have any unfinished business, finish it! Take conscious charge of the law of cause and effect so that you are getting the effects that you really want. Remember that if you tell the truth, you don’t have to complicate things in your mind by remember anything. And if you walk your talk, there are no contradictory, cluttering energies within your being. When you actively simplify in your life, your life will feel like it is lived on your own terms. You will have the space and time to actually create the life you want to live. You will have the energy and inspiration to dedicate yourself to your true values... to what really matters to you. You will find yourself living a life that is empty of clutter but full of meaning. Even though most of us feel like we could use some comfort, comfort is often the enemy of change. And because we are in a several year cycle of change, comfort is not something the universe will offer you in 2022. 2022 is a year of extremes. Extremes relative to every element of life. For example: Wealth and poverty, health and illness, liberal and conservative, freedom and control, war and peace. Uncertainty which is still at a high in 2022, causes people to go to the extreme of either becoming reactive or becoming frozen. You will also see these extremes relative to the elements. Water and fire collide in 2022. So do cold and heat. You will see flooding and fires especially. Coastal areas will be particularly effected. As in 2021, 2022 still contains the assertive presence of meteorites and asteroids. Due to this several year cycle of societal re-structuring, there is a simultaneous de-construction of what was and what is, at the exact same time as there is a building up of something new. There is an opportunity for a whole new world structure to be built. And the structure of government is one of those things that is the most in-flux worldwide. The human ego (a sense of separate self) is concerned with itself. It is primarily concerned with its own survival and its own best interests; especially when its survival and best interests are threatened. This is a state of narcissism. What we have on our hands is a very dangerous situation worldwide. The Covid Pandemic has threatened people's sense of survival and best interests. Whether people feel threatened by the idea of a virus or by the measures being imposed and taken by others (especially governing bodies), the threat has created an insecurity that has caused people to start to think and speak and act with only their own survival and best interests in mind. It has caused them to slip into a narcissistic state. This is a terrible time on earth for relationships (which requires deep consideration for and caretaking of the best interests of the "other"). People who have slipped into "only the best interests of me/mine" thinking are capable of doing some horrific things to others. As a result of this dynamic that people have slipped into, in 2022 there are hot spots of conflict and also of war popping up across the planet. When these hot spots appear, it means that 2022 is a decisive year relative to world war. France is a hot spot for this upheaval. So is the Ukraine. So is Poland. So is Belarus. So is Somalia. So is Iran. So is Taiwan. So is Mozambique. And the USA is a glaring hot spot for this government upheaval and flux in 2022. In 2022 the very system of beliefs and laws that govern and dictate the organization of the USA will be re-evaluated. The way that the US is structured is palpably cracking. It is a very insecure year for USA. And what happens in USA this year will have dramatic impact on the rest of the world. Financially speaking, the world’s financial markets are being manipulated completely. Because of this, everything you are seeing is being distorted. The financial market worldwide is still proving to be a collective gaslight. It does not reflect reality in any way because of this manipulation. In reality, 2022 is not a good year for finances worldwide. There is inflation and wherever there is inflation, there is also the potential for crash. The financial market upheaval and inflation spells huge issues for the US dollar. There is a lot of incentive on behalf of so many parties involved in the financial market to lie about and cover up inflation in 2022. One of those many incentives is that inflation impacts psychology… Which is my problem mentioning this because when people become aware of inflation, inflation becomes a self-fulfilling loop. One of the biggest issues that all governments in the world will face in 2022 is that saving the economy will be seemingly juxtaposed to saving the environment. As of now, China is going to determine when the actual reality of the economy becomes obvious to the people. On the non-physical plane, a triangle (the position of deadlock) is forming between USA, China and Russia. And the development of biological weaponry is peaking in conjunction with the pressure that this deadlock is creating. The strength of the European union is going to be heavily tested if not severely weakened by economic and political conflicts in 2022. Brexit was only the beginning. Climate change, violent conflicts and problems regarding resources will force many people to confront the fear of death, specifically due to conflict and to lack of resources and these forces will lead to population movements…immigrations. These mass migrations will put huge pressure on the countries that the immigrants and refugees migrate to. In the world today, there is a “collective ego return”. This time, a comeback of totalitarianism. Of course those who are ushering in this comeback will be denying that this is the case. Humanity’s commitment to a government that is based on individual rights, civil liberties, multiculturalism, free enterprise, and consent of the governed is going to be put to the test. To put it bluntly, humanity has not learned its lesson from massive conflicts and tragedies in the past related to politics, money, media, power, fear, separation and physical sovereignty etc. And so, the opportunity to learn the lesson is back again. Within human consciousness there will be huge issues the world over with authority in 2022. There is a clash between those who want a top-down power structure and those who are totally done with it. What you will see happen with Covid regulations and measures, as well as information about Covid’s true origins, is just a symptom of this comeback and clash. It doesn’t take a genius to see that people will be grappling with rules, regulations, unfairness, control and power structures. Humanity is encountering a complete return of their collective childhood trauma about authority figures doing unwanted things “for your own good”. In the world today, we are dealing with not one, but several very powerful external authority figures. This time period is a calling to re-examine authority; not to simply comply or to simply rebel. In 2022, earth is a battle ground between control and freedom. But it will take several more years to restructure power within our human society. All this being said, the good news is that the energy surrounding April of 2022 is like a huge open exit door from all the tribulation. There is huge opportunity for mass awakening that specifically leads people to the experience of objective perspective and also to the experience of being “shoulder to shoulder” with their fellow men. Another important element of this mass awakening is that in 2022, there is a decided abandonment of organized religion taking place and instead, a seeking of alternative and more personalized spirituality. In 2021 into 2022, we have been and are confronting our individual and collective patterns that exist in the energetic range of futility, pessimism, nihilism, failure, ineffectiveness, pointlessness, doom, fatalism, defeat and unworkability… The ultimate resistance. In 2022, you must not fall into the trap of passively waiting for something to change and/or succumbing to stagnation and/or turning circles in your stuck-ness. The feeling of being out of control of the external elements of your life to the degree that you feel like no action you take will work, can make you decide to just do nothing. And this, is a mistake! And it is here that perhaps the best news about 2022 comes into play. In 2022 the energies in the universe are less aligned with “challenge”. This is not to say that 2022 will not be difficult. It is to say that 2022 provides a wave for creating and attracting what you want. In fact, so much so that nothing is too insane or too “out there” or too lofty to become reality. Chances are high that you felt like you were being prevented for a while. Or that everything was in your way and acting against you attracting or creating what you want in your life. That oppositional energy is clearing up in 2022. This is a year to break the limitations. In 2022, you are likely to see the results of what you’ve been struggling to create or attract in previous years. And the more you are able to simplify, the more dramatic these results will be. Because of this nonphysical wave of actualization energy, there is a corresponding wave of babies that are coming into the physical plane in 2022 that think differently, that are especially creative, especially artistic, especially talented and whose purpose is to use those perceptual differences and gifts to actualize the advancement of human society. 2022 is no departure from the technological takeover which will not stop and will not slow down. 2022 is the dawn of robotics in humanity. Even though robots have been around for a while, they were not really a part of most people’s every day awareness. 2022 is the year where this incrementally begins to change. And robots will move into position to become the interface between the consciousness of technology and the consciousness of humanity. The energy of the year 2022 is very “experimental”. This experimental energy brings both the terror of uncertainty and the excitement of the potential of breakthrough to something better than what was certain before. This year, in order to thrive in your own life, you must stop hoping for things to go back to what used to work and to what was stable and familiar before. You must not sit and passively wait to “be able” to do things. You must not get trapped by stagnation. Instead, you must step outside the norm. Become like a scientist experimenting with your own life. When you are tempted to try out something totally different and new this year, remember that you can afford a lot of experimentation this year! The experimentation you do and the changes you make may not only take the form of changes that we would consider future oriented. For some individuals they may alternatively take on the form of changes that are past oriented. For example, one person may choose to experiment by aggressively implementing technology into their business. Another person my decide to return to the land and to minimalistic living. Not all of these experiments will turn out the way you think they will or hope they will. Some will turn out better and some will turn out worse. No matter how these experiments turn out however, know that they are better than stagnation. The experimentation in and of itself is the point this year. One day soon, hopefully thanks to what 2022 has in store for us, we are going to have to genuinely recognize and accept that we have not created a society that is conducive to human health, much less the health of any other fellow being that shares this planet with us. The pressure is being exerted upon each and every one of us. There is a sense of “I can’t take it any longer”, “something’s got to give” and “this can’t go on like this”. These sentiments are indicative of a crisis point. “Evolve or else” is the universe’s message for this entire several year cycle of change. A crisis throws you into the ocean of uncertainty. A crisis threatens the things you value, need and want. But a crisis only occurs when an old way of being cannot be maintained and so a change for the new is forced upon you. If you allow a crisis to direct you and shape you and refine you towards meaning and purpose and towards a life that is in alignment with your values, a crisis can be something that is woven into the tapestry of your life so that it makes your life both better and more. REFERENCES: Equivalent to '30 tons of TNT': Meteor explodes in Pennsylvania on New Year's Day Russia-Ukraine crisis: Why Brussels fears Europe is 'closest to war' in decades US West Coast under tsunami advisory following massive volcanic eruption on Pacific island https://www.cnn.com/2022/01/24/politics/biden-troops-europe/index.html .embed-container { position: relative; padding-bottom: 56.25%; height: 0; overflow: hidden; max-width: 100%; } .embed-container iframe, .embed-container object, .embed-container embed { position: absolute; top: 0; left: 0; width: 100%; height: 100%; }