These days when I decide to go to sleep, I can typically fall asleep within 30 seconds or less. Sometimes I can be asleep within just 2-3 seconds. As Rachelle can attest, this is no exaggeration.

This isn’t narcolepsy. I don’t drift off during the day, and I don’t fall asleep as soon as my head hits the pillow. Unless I’m unusually super-tired, the decision to sleep is under conscious control. When I decide to sleep, my body falls asleep almost immediately.

This is true for falling asleep at night as well as for taking naps if I so desire.

On many occasions I’ve been startled awake while Rachelle and I were lying in bed together. After we talked for a while, I decided to fall sleep, so I did just that. A few seconds later I’m startled awake by Rachelle, who suddenly started talking again. To her it was just a pause in the conversation lasting only seconds, but for me that was enough time to fall asleep, start dreaming, and be startled awake, clearly remembering the details of my dream.

This sometimes happens 2-3 times in a row. After being startled awake once, I “thank” Rachelle for scaring me, and then I go right back to sleep within seconds. Rachelle mistakenly assumes I’m still awake and makes another verbal comment, which wakes me up yet again. Sometimes she laughs about it, not in a sadistic way but rather in semi-disbelief that I could be falling asleep so quickly. She also finds it amusing.

When this happens a few times in a row, sometimes I’ll re-enter the same dream and continue where I left off, but usually I’ll enter a different dream that doesn’t seem related to the first dream.

There’s a bit of time dilation when I’m dreaming, so I may feel that several minutes have passed in the dream world, while Rachelle tells me that only seconds passed within her waking time frame.

This has happened more times that I can count. It’s definitely not an isolated event.

Normally I start dreaming immediately as I’m falling asleep, sometimes even before I’m asleep. When I close my eyes at night, I can often see dream characters trying to interact with me and dream scenery beginning to open up. It’s very easy to slip into that dream world if I just keep my eyes closed.

Falling asleep in this way is like accepting an invitation. I don’t have to do anything. I just have to welcome the dream world that’s already beckoning me to join it. It’s a feeling of being pulled into the dream world as opposed to trying to get myself to fall asleep. It takes more effort to stay awake.

I’m not saying this ability is special or unique. I’ve studied various how-to aspects of sleep like lucid dreaming and sleep hacking, but I don’t know what the statistics are in terms of how long it takes most people to fall asleep. A bit of Google searching suggests it’s around 10 minutes though, unless you have insomnia.

For me this was a significant change since I didn’t have this “ability” before experimenting with polyphasic sleep. Those 5-1/2 months of sleeping in a different pattern must have trained my body to initiate sleep without delay. With only 20 minute naps around the clock, my body had to learn to go to sleep very quickly and not waste a minute of precious sleep time. Otherwise I’d have been very sleep deprived during those months. By necessity my body had to speed up the process it used to fall asleep. I couldn’t waste 10 minutes trying to fall asleep if my nap was only 20 minutes total — that would be like trying to function on half as much sleep.

Even though Rachelle sometimes finds it a bit odd, and I get startled awake more often than I’d like, I consider this change to be a beneficial gain. My sleep is much more efficient than it was before I experimented with sleep hacking. I don’t waste time lying in bed trying to fall asleep. When I want to go to sleep, I sleep. And if I want to delay sleep and stay up later, I can do that too.

I share this partly as a cautionary warning to others who want to experiment with different sleep patterns. There may be long-term consequences even if you only experiment for a short time. Some consequences may not be so positive. So if you do undertake such experiments, be aware that you’re taking a risk.

Uncopyrighted by Steve Pavlina

Let me share some perspectives that should make it easier to understand the process of waking up.

The Cellular Perspective

From the cellular perspective, you can see yourself as an individual person interacting with other individuals. You’re like a single cell in the larger body of humanity, which is comprised of billions of other people-cells.

For example, I could say that I’m a guy (a cell) who’s dedicated to helping people (other cells) live more consciously. I may communicate with many people during my lifetime, but each person is a unique individual, so the impact is different for everyone. We may all be part of some larger body of humanity, but our interactions mainly occur at the individual cellular level.

This is similar to one of the cells in your body noticing the other cells around it and deciding to do what it can to be of service to those cells. It may help a lot of cells, but it still regards itself as an individual cell helping other individual cells. And it won’t help all cells equally, nor could it do so even if it tried.

The Holistic Perspective

From the holistic perspective, you see yourself as an integral part of the universe as a whole. The overall intent is to help universal consciousness grow and evolve, particularly the human consciousness of which you’re a part.

This would be like one of the cells in your body recognizing that it’s part of a larger physical body, whereby it stops thinking of itself primarily as an individual cell and begins to see itself as being of potential service to the greater whole. Its fate isn’t as important as the fate of the larger body.

So with this perspective, instead of thinking of myself as a guy who helps people live more consciously, I can see myself as a servant of humanity helping to create a more conscious humanity, or as a servant of universal consciousness itself. My primary role here is to serve conscious evolution, which isn’t necessarily what’s best for any particular individual human in the short term.

Other Perspectives

Of course there are other perspective too. We could discuss identification with community, nation, all life, the cosmos, etc. These perspectives are equally valid, but exploring them would add complexity without adding much substance to the core ideas. So for now I want to keep this simple.

On the atomic side, you’re an individual, and other people are individuals too. On the holistic side, we’re all part of a greater whole.

I’m not suggesting that any one perspective is best. All of these perspectives are valid. But I will suggest that it’s important to integrate the holistic perspective more fully into your life if you wish to experience a healthier flow of abundance.

“Waking up” basically means that you consider and integrate the holistic perspective as part of your daily life. Of course there are degrees of waking up, depending on how aware you are of the holistic perspective and how fully you’ve integrated it into your life. In the same manner, the cells in your body may have varying degrees of awareness that they are in fact part of a larger human body.

Alternatively, to be “asleep” is to be unaware of the larger holistic perspective. We could also define this behaviorally by saying that someone is asleep if they’re aware of the holistic perspective, but they don’t attempt to act congruently with it. In terms of semantics, I’d say that the first group is asleep, while the second group is trying to sleep.

Fairness

At the individual level, fairness seems to be about equality. But of course we don’t see that much genuine equality in the world. It’s quite obvious that some individuals have more resources than others. Some people seem to be luckier too.

Does your own human body care about fairness when it doles out resources like oxygen and sugar to its individual cells? To an extent, sure. When resources are abundant, there’s plenty for all, but even then the distribution isn’t perfectly equal. And when resources become scarce, the body will starve cells that are less important to its survival to divert more resources to the most crucial cells.

So the question is, are you an essential cell in the larger body of consciousness? Or are you superfluous? Well… look at the resources that life sends your way. Do you feel all your needs are well met — your physical needs, emotional needs, social needs, self esteem needs, etc? Are you a highly self-actualized individual? Or do you have strong unfulfilled cravings for things that are important to you? Have you possibly given up on meeting some of your needs? Are you flourishing or are you stuck?

If you’re struggling to get your needs met, that’s a hint and a half that life itself isn’t particularly concerned with your well-being. Don’t fret though if this describes your situation. It’s a problem that can be fixed. Just don’t try to fix it by clamoring and complaining — that doesn’t work and will often backfire.

This may not seem fair, but in a way it is reasonable. You may be a very nice, kind, and generous person, but if your focus is at the cellular level, you’re probably missing so much of the big picture that in the grand scheme of things, your contribution just doesn’t matter that much, at least not from the perspective of universal consciousness.

You may be doing what could just as easily be done by someone else, which means you’re highly expendable. You may be playing follow the follower. You may be genuinely helping, but only at the cellular level. You may be doing nothing much, which makes it easy to ignore you.

If you live in such a way that doesn’t really contribute much, don’t be too surprised if it seems like life is starving you for resources. After all, life doesn’t need you as much if you aren’t actively helping with its expansion and growth.

Consider the cells in your own body. You may scratch an itch on your arm and kill lots of cells in the process without even thinking about it. Individual skin cells just aren’t that important to your overall survival. But you’re less likely to scratch off a patch of critical brain cells. A cut on your finger is no cause for alarm, but a cut on your eyeball is something you’d do more to avoid. Your body is even designed to protect some parts more than others. If something flies at your face, you’ll automatically throw up your arms to protect your head. But you won’t normally use your head to protect your arms.

Do you think you’re among the critical humans that the larger body of humanity would move to defend and protect? Or are you among the sacrificial parts?

What Does Consciousness Want?

What do you want as a human being? Think about your goals, dreams, and aspirations for a moment.

Now consider what an individual cell in your body would want. It wants oxygen and sugar. It wants to eliminate waste. Is this on the same level as your goals? Do you aspire to breathe, eat, and take dumps as your primary goals for the year?

Hopefully not.

Now look at this from the other side. From the perspective of the consciousness itself, your human-level dreams and goals seem petty. It’s important to keep people happy to an extent, but the fate of any one human is largely insignificant. Universal consciousness really doesn’t care if you have a job or an income, if you get the house you want, if you have a good relationship or not. It doesn’t care if you get laid or remain a virgin.

Well, it cares a little, but it’s not a major concern, just as you aren’t overly concerned about the fate of any individual cells in your body. It’s the body’s overall status that matters. And you probably identify more with your mind (your collective cellular intelligence) as opposed to your physical body anyway.

Similarly, universal consciousness is more concerned with the evolution of consciousness itself (our collective consciousness) as opposed to the fate of any individual human or even of humanity itself. Now the loss of humanity would probably be a setback, but consciousness may eventually recover in other forms.

What does consciousness really want? Like you and like your individual cells, it wants to get its needs met, and it wants to grow and evolve. But the level on which it’s capable of doing this goes way beyond what you’re capable of as an individual.

Look around at all the amazing — and accelerating — achievements of consciousness. It’s expanding in many directions simultaneously. Consider what’s evolving on earth. Humanity itself is becoming smarter and faster and more connected. And it’s having some health issues to deal with as well. And consciousness wants to keep going.

Living Small or Living Large

You can spend your life fussing over your own piddly cellular needs, but in the grand scheme of things, it won’t be anything to write home about. No matter what you do or don’t do as an individual, it’s just not going to matter that much.

The same can be said of any cell in your body. At the individual level, a single cell isn’t particularly important.

Imagine asking a cell in your body what he’s doing with his life, and he talks about the Bloodstream Marketing course he’s taking and how excited he is about all the extra sugar he’ll earn from his efforts. Oh boy!

But will his efforts pay off? Probably not. If he isn’t getting his needs met, there’s probably a good reason for it. The larger body will see that his needs are well met if there’s a good reason to do so. Otherwise it will divert resources where they’re needed.

This is how silly we humans appear to universal consciousness. It still cares about us and wants to see us happy for the most part, but it finds our cellular perspective to be rather limiting. If you push to get your individual needs met, but you do so in ways that the larger body doesn’t care about or which may interfere with its bigger plans, it will either ignore you, or it will swat you down like a mosquito.

Imagine if a cell in your body said, I just want to eat food and reproduce like crazy. That might seem fun from his perspective, but then the larger body has a tumor to deal with. Send in the white blood cells.

If you feel like some greater force keeps knocking you back down every time you try to get ahead, you’re not imagining it. It really is knocking you back down, and it will continue to do so until you stop trying to get ahead like a cancer cell would. Have you ever noticed, for instance, that as soon as you try to make progress on cancer-like projects, you keep getting distracted, so your attention has to turn somewhere else?

Quite often we cry “Life is so unfair” when from a larger perspective, it’s a no brainer that life is either going to ignore us or attack us. Humanity’s white blood cells will come after us and make life unpleasant for us when we forget that we’re part of a larger whole and that its well-being is more important than our individual well-being.

Now imagine if an individual cell in your body said to you, “Wait a minute. I get it. I may be just a tiny cell, but I’m a part of this whole body. That’s cool. Is there anything I can do to help?”

What would you say to it? You might wonder what one conscious cell could do for your whole body. Not much most likely. But then you might think, What if this cell could wake up many others, and what if those cells could awaken still more? Eventually you could have a body filled with cells that were aware of the whole body and seeking to serve it. This would fix a lot of your problems. You’d have much better health for starters. Cancer wouldn’t be able to take root. Most diseases would be eradicated easily. You’d always be able to maintain your ideal weight.

So you might tell that one conscious cell, “Go around and wake up more cells. Gather them together. Then we’ll talk.”

Being a Conscious Human

A conscious cell is aware of the whole body and realizes that the body matters more than any individual cell. The cells are there to serve the evolution of the body and mind, not merely themselves. There’s obviously a connection between the good of the cells and the good of the body, but it’s easier to have a healthy body if on some level, the cells are aware that the body’s health is more important than their own. A cell that works against the health of the body is a disease cell.

A conscious human being is aware of the larger body of humanity and has a sense of a greater consciousness that’s unfolding and evolving at a much higher level than any individual human can.

There is value in the lower level perspective. It’s not a perspective to ignore but rather to integrate with the holistic perspective. For example, through relaxed meditative breathing, we can connect with the lower level perspective of our own cells. Breathe in. Breathe out. We’re getting plenty of oxygen. Life is good. This cellular level perspective can help to ground us. Many meditations are essentially about tuning back in to this cellular perspective, while other meditations involve expanding to a more holistic perspective. The ideal is to be able to consider all of these perspectives as valid.

If our cells aren’t healthy, our bodies can’t be healthy, and so humanity itself can’t be healthy. And of course the opposite holds true as well. But there are ways of meeting our needs on different levels that are in alignment with all of these perspectives, and there are other ways that are out of alignment. To live consciously, we need to shift towards the ways that are in alignment, so we can meet our needs as we also meet the needs of the cells in our bodies and of the greater body of humanity.

I’m certainly not the first human being to have the experience of “waking up” and becoming aware of this. Other conscious humans helped wake me up and continue to help me stay awake… or to reawaken me when I lose that perspective. I also endeavor to do my part and help other people wake up to the realization that jobs and money and marriage and retirement just aren’t that important. There are more important things to attend to here. Meeting our cellular needs is still important, but we don’t want to fuss at that level too much. We have more significant work to do here, and we could be experiencing life at a much higher level of existence.

Living your life as a part of humanity will take your experience to a level that’s far beyond life as an individual human being. Even if your intention is to help people, try expanding it to a vision of helping humanity, as if humanity itself is a conscious entity. It’s a whole different level of being.

Now what I’m seeing is that the gathering phase is well underway. Many years ago, it seemed like conscious people were very isolated. Now they’re coming together in bigger and bigger groups. I’m involved in multiple groups of this nature, and it seems like every few months I’m hearing about new groups forming. The conscious humans are clustering, and these clusters are growing larger and more organized. It’s as if new organs are incubating with the larger body of humanity. Something is definitely happening, and it’s a wondrous thing to behold.

Consequently, while I know some people are worried about where humanity is headed, I’m not worried at all. In fact, I’m excited about it. I have the privilege of being able to see what many of these conscious people are up to, and they’re starting to create transformational ripples. If you’re reading this article, then these ripples have already reached you, and you’re being impacted by them.

Some conscious cells are still isolated, however. Others are in very small groups only. And of course there are lots of people who still primarily think at the cellular level (go Bloodstream Marketing). But this is changing.

Perhaps the simplest way I can explain what’s happening is that humanity’s Power has been increasing by leaps and bounds, and now its alignment with Truth and Love desperately need to catch up. Otherwise humanity will eventually crash and burn. For instance, the first atomic bombs were dropped only 66 years ago, yet now we must somehow ensure that they’re never used on a global scale, not even 1000 years from now. One serious mistake or lapse during any minute that we have nukes, and it’s a major setback for us all. That’s a tall order that cannot be satisfied at the cellular level of consciousness. We’ve had too many close calls already (see the documentary Countdown to Zero for details on that). The larger body of humanity is aware of this challenge, and it recognizes that we need more people who are Truthful, Loving, and Powerful to deal with this existential threat.

You’re going to start picking up on this at the individual level, if you haven’t already. For instance, you’re going to feel far less tolerant of political leaders who lie to you. We’re going to see different kinds of leaders emerge, the kinds of leaders we truly need in this day and age. There are plenty of people like that, but in order for them to become popular enough, we just have to continue waking up more individual people. Once enough people are awake (or stop trying to sleep), we’ll see some major shifts. These shifts are already happening in the world of business, where popularity with the masses isn’t as necessary.

The Flow of Abundance

What we’re seeing is that on some level, this higher consciousness is taking note of what’s happening, and it seems to be assisting and accelerating the process. It wants human beings to wake up because a body of conscious cells can do much more than a body of unconscious ones. So if you’re concerned that there are too many crises in the world, recognize that there’s an upside. These major challenges are helping more and more people to finally wake up. We can’t even begin to address these challenges with cellular-level thinking, so we have to wake up in order to solve them.

There’s a lot of rebalancing that’s occurring as universal consciousness and individual human consciousness communicate with each other about how to best meet each others’ needs. How can humanity continue to evolve and expand while keeping individual humans happy and healthy? For humanity to be at its best, enough individual humans need to be at their best as well. You’re going to see this reflected in your own life too, as you grapple with the challenge of how to serve some greater life purpose while also making sure your individual needs are satisfied. In a way, you’re helping humanity experiment in order to find good solutions, which it can then spread to other cells. This is why cells like me feel an undeniable urge to pass on what we’ve figured out thus far.

As I’ve seen in my own life, this higher level consciousness is clearly listening. Somehow it can perceive the level at which we’re thinking, and it responds in kind. If you keep thinking at the cellular level, this higher consciousness will keep trying to wake you up. You may lose your job and other possessions, for instance, until you finally realize that those things don’t matter. We have more important things to deal with right now.

I’m far from perfect in this area, but I’m gradually getting the hang of it. I’m noticing that whenever I slip back down to cellular level thinking, I get a good smackdown. I feel like everything slows to a crawl. And when I shift back up to a higher level perspective, it’s like I’m back in the flow again. The phone rings with fresh opportunities, money just shows up, loving relationships flow into my life, and more. Fortunately perfection isn’t necessary. We just have to shift the balance far enough to achieve critical mass.

For those who are stuck at the cellular level of thinking, I suspect that life is going to become increasingly difficult for you. You’re going to see your worries, fears, and frustrations magnified. Life will seem to be getting worse. It may seem like important aspects of society are falling apart around you. This is happening for a reason though. These old systems are going to be dismantled. That’s actually a good thing. They’ll be replaced with better things.

For instance, you may be worried about debt, either your own or your country’s or someone else’s. But from the larger perspective of humanity, debt is meaningless. Humanity really doesn’t care if our financial system collapses or not. In fact, it may be better for it to collapse and be replaced by something else. So if you’re really attached to the current system and the money in your bank, you may get scared. But if you’re looking at the big picture, you’ll probably feel excited instead.

Be willing to lose what doesn’t matter, so we can all gain what does matter. Jobs don’t matter, but creativity does. Paying our bills doesn’t matter, but keeping our bodies healthy does. Getting good grades in school doesn’t matter, but preserving and passing on our collective knowledge does. Start reorganizing your life around what matters, and be willing to shed what doesn’t.

Try not to be too attached to remnants of the old cellular consciousness, like the money you have, the job you do, and the home you live in. The more you cling to those things, the more stressed out you’ll be. Just notice that these are all artificial cellular level concerns. What’s important is that humanity is evolving in a very positive way. You can resist that change and see your old goals fall apart, or you can flow with it and actively participate in the process of change.

For those who are waking up, life is going to become much easier in a way. Your life will explode with opportunities to learn, love, share, and grow. The good stuff will come from your alignment with the expansion of universal consciousness. But it’s important to keep the perspective of what really matters. Money doesn’t matter. Bloodstream/Internet Marketing is pointless and shallow. Waking people up and consciously co-creating something amazing is what matters.

When you align yourself with this higher level consciousness, abundance will flow through your life with relative ease. However, this type of abundance will be universal level abundance, not human level abundance. It doesn’t mean you’ll necessarily have more money, a more luxurious home, or more possessions. That kind of stuff just doesn’t matter and represents artificial needs, not real needs. This level of abundance means that you’ll be experiencing the benefits of being in a healthier body. You’ll get more of what really matters — more growth opportunities, more love, more joy, more inner peace.

Focus on your true needs. What do you need to feel abundant? You need to keep your body healthy with healthy food, sunshine, and clean air and water. You need a reasonable degree of safety. You need love and belongingness. You need self esteem. You need an outlet for your creativity. Your true needs are quite simple in fact, and they’re easier to satisfy than your artificial needs. You don’t need the latest tech gadget. You don’t need a job or an income. You don’t need to get married. You don’t need to master Bloodstream Marketing.

Your artificial needs may not align well with humanity’s larger concerns. But your true needs certainly do align. It’s in humanity’s best interests to keep its best servants healthy, happy, and prosperous. In that sense, it you dedicate yourself to serving this greater body, it will surely watch your back.

Aligning With Higher Level Desires

In order to tap into this greater flow of abundance, you have to tap into higher level desires.

First, recognize that your human level goals are beginning to bore you. No matter how important you try to make them, you can’t get motivated to work on them. You just can’t get that worked up about making money beyond a certain point. People may tell you it’s important to have specific financial goals, but when you try to do this for yourself, it makes you feel yucky inside. You can’t get motivated to work on those kinds of goals. They don’t inspire you. And so you procrastinate and then beat yourself up. It’s time to end this cycle. It’s time to re-align your desires with something that actually matters to you. You can set better goals than the human equivalent of stockpiling oxygen and sugar.

Stop thinking about what you want for yourself as an individual. Start thinking about what you want for humanity as a whole.

In the past, you may have been hesitant to even think at that level. Start thinking at that level now.

What do you want for humanity itself? Where would you like to see this larger body go during your lifetime and beyond?

Do you want us to clean up the planet? Explore outer space? Improve our educational systems? Stop fighting wars?

Let yourself dream about what’s possible for humanity. Notice that these dreams are much more impressive than anything you could possibly do as an individual.

Become a billionaire? Who cares? Start a charity? Big deal. Discover a new planet? Nice try. When will you be ready to work on a real goal, a goal for humanity itself?

Receiving Guidance

The best part is that you don’t even need to figure this out yourself. All you need to do is wake up to this higher level perspective, and then simply ping this universal consciousness to tell it you’re awake and ready to serve. Ask it for guidance, and guidance will come.

Just be aware that universal consciousness is frakkin powerful. It’s way more powerful than human level consciousness. When you tap into this resource and align yourself with it, your life is going to speed up. At first it may seem like drinking from a firehouse. It will take some time to get used to it.

If you feel that the flow is too much for you, you can ask it to slow down. I do this all the time. When I’m feeling overwhelmed, I say to the universe aloud, “Okay… this is too fast. Let’s slow this down for a week or two and give me a chance to catch my breath.” Then when I’m ready, I ask it to speed up again.

With practice you’ll get used to this faster pacing. You’ll get used to things showing up when you need them. You’ll get used to experiencing synchronicities almost every day.

A synchronicity is no accident. Universal consciousness knows what you need, perhaps even better than you do. You really don’t even have to ask for your specific needs to be met once you ask to be a better servant of humanity. As Jesus said, just say, “Not my will, but thy will be done.”

Lately I’ve been holding off on setting specific goals for myself. Instead I’ve been saying to the universe, “Bring me what you want me to work on, and also please bring me whatever you know I need for optimal health, happiness, and flow.” And then I do my best to remain open-minded and detached from outcomes. I let the universal consciousness guide me instead of having to set specific goals and intentions. I still have an intention, but it’s simply to do what’s best for humanity as a whole.

Partly I’m doing this because I’ve reached the point where any individual-level goal would bore me, and I wouldn’t be able to motivate myself to work on it. I just don’t care that much about oxygen and sugar to make it the central focus of my life. So I’m willing to risk things like losing my money, losing my home, having my relationships disrupted, etc. just for the opportunity to see where this flow leads. And yet somehow when I move past this fear of losing stuff, I seem to gain much more than I lose. As far as meeting my human needs goes, they’re all nicely satisfied and then some. Bloodstream Marketing just can’t compare.

Effect on Relationships

When you begin to align yourself with the perspective of higher level consciousness, your relationships with other people will shift. Try not to be too attached to what happens here. Your pairings with any one or more individuals aren’t necessarily going to be stable. It’s how your relationships affect the whole of humanity that matters. What ripples are you and your relationships co-creating?

People who aren’t compatible with this new perspective will fade from your life. At first you may fear that you’re going to end up alone, but there’s no cause for alarm. New relationships will come into your life, relationships with people who have a similar perspective. And these relationships will be much better for you than the old ones. They’ll help you hold the new perspective.

These new relationships will be different than what you’re used to, however. There will be less rigidity and more flexibility in this part of your life. Such relationships may defy traditional labels. You may feel a bit ungrounded in this new space. It takes time to get used to it.

Eventually you’ll realize that happiness and love can come from anywhere. You may have your emotional needs met equally well by a long-time partner or with someone you just met. Universal consciousness will guide you to whatever it is that you need to sustain your emotional health, as long as you don’t get too attached to how it shows up. If you remain open and flexible, your emotional needs can be satisfied with relative ease. Trust that universal consciousness knows just what you need, and it will deliver it right to you if you’re ready to accept it. Again, you don’t even have to ask once you’re on this path. It will satisfy your emotional needs because doing so makes you a better servant. You can’t serve humanity so well if you’re feeling lonely and disconnected. You’ll be more motivated if you have love in your life, so love will be delivered unto you.

Compared to where I was a few years ago, my relationship life might seem a bit strange these days. I have many relationships that would be difficult to label, but they seem to be healthy and flourishing in ways that are hard to get my head around. I can’t really define what they are, and I can’t predict where they’re going. But it seems like these connections are good and healthy for all involved. My biggest relationship challenge is unloading the traditional-minded baggage that nudges me to lock down and label each relationship, so I can feel like I understand it. But whenever I fall into that pattern, things get worse, not better. Conscious relationships don’t seem to like being locked down and labeled. They require more freedom and flow.

At first this sort of situation could make a person feel insecure. You may be accustomed to having a sense of security based on the stability of predictable interactions with people close to you.

However, when you align yourself with universal consciousness, you’re likely to move around a lot more relationship-wise. You’re going to meet and interact with a lot more people than you’re used to. Your social life will be rich and varied. Your stability has to come from trusting that no matter where you are, your emotional needs will still be satisfied. You’ll have the opportunity to share love, intimacy, affection, etc., and it can be more abundant than what you experienced at the individual level of being. I assure you that you won’t have to go it alone. This isn’t a lonely path — it’s actually an incredibly social path.

Effect on Work

Your work life will be transformed as well. You’ll probably need to stop thinking of your career in terms of having a stable job and earning a set income. Serving humanity requires a lot more flexibility and flow than a traditional job can provide. Thinking of starting or running a business is equally limiting. This is human level thinking. What does humanity need?

Humanity is more concerned with things like creativity, purpose, and expansion. It would love to see you contribute to the ongoing expansion and evolution of consciousness. That’s what matters. The other stuff is too trivial to fuss over.

I don’t really have a job title. Sometimes I make one up like President or CEO when it’s required for social convention, but the title is meaningless to me. When people ask me what I do for a living, I don’t really know what to say. I don’t do anything for a living. I just live. In certain situations I might say that I’m a blogger, author, or speaker, but that’s mainly what I say to people who are asleep and I don’t have time to wake them up in that particular moment. If I’m talking to someone who’s awake, then either they won’t ask such a silly question, or they’ll understand my honest answer… and they’ll probably share a similar feeling about job titles.

My business cards have the wrong address because I haven’t updated them in 5 years. My website obviously isn’t the prettiest one out there. I’ve never spent money to market or promote my website, book, or workshops. I don’t think it would be a bad thing to do so; it just hasn’t ever been necessary. Humanity takes care of all my marketing and does a better job than I could.

Last year I uncopyrighted all my blog posts and podcasts, so you have just as much ownership of this article as I do. From a cellular level, that might seem like a foolish decision. But that isn’t the level at which I made the decision. What does a copyright mean to humanity? Of course it’s meaningless. What would you think if one of your cells tried to patent the Krebs Cycle? Silly cells…

Some people are repackaging and selling my work for money. Does that bother me? Of course not. Even though they may be operating at an individual level of consciousness, they’re actually helping. They’re spreading ideas that humanity wants to spread; after all, humanity gave me those ideas to share in the first place. They’re doing exactly what they’re supposed to be doing. I think some of them have been donating back to me as well, since I’ve seen a modest increase in donations lately. But I didn’t do this to get more donations. I did it because it should help the ideas spread and get more people thinking about living consciously. It really doesn’t matter which humans get credit or make money from it.

I think my business actually works better because I don’t manage it with a cellular mindset. Millions of people have been drawn to my work, and it’s been translated into more languages than I can track. People keep sharing it, with or without my permission. New opportunities keep showing up. Money keeps flowing. Everything works. Well, aside from my web server, which I may have to upgrade yet again due to traffic growth. But that’s a good problem to have, isn’t it?

Why does my business work? Because it’s not really a business. It’s a service, not primarily for individual humans, but for humanity itself. The purpose is to help enough people wake up and live more consciously, so that humanity itself may continue to survive and thrive. And by performing this service for humanity, it takes care of all my needs. It’s really good at it too. I barely have to lift a finger to attend to such things. I rather appreciate that.

Individually speaking, there are some humans out there who don’t particularly like my work. But that’s largely irrelevant because humanity as a whole has made it abundantly clear that it appreciates what I’m doing and wants to speed things along with further expansion. These days I largely ignore cellular level feedback because it comes from people at varying levels of wakefulness, so of course they won’t all agree. But I pay close attention to feedback from universal consciousness, such as whether my life is flowing well or not. These days it’s flowing amazingly well, so I figure I’m on the right track.

Is humanity making it abundantly clear that it appreciates what you’re doing? If not, any guesses as to why? Could it be that you’ve been ignoring humanity’s needs, and thus it’s been ignoring your needs? Try doing the opposite and see what happens. I think you’ll like it.

Conscious Business

Recently I’ve been listening to an audiobook about the history of Google. Google began as a fairly idealistic company with the grand mission of organizing and providing access to all the world’s information. Does that sound like an individual level goal or a goal for humanity itself? Of course Google has since become a giant, besting all other search companies. Interestingly, one of the reasons it succeeded is because it attracted some of the brightest minds in the world, people who were inspired by its mission and who would not have worked for the company if it was just about the money. You could say that humanity diverted the best resources to Google because Google’s mission served the best interests of humanity. In fact, Google has helped to create a smarter, more self-aware humanity.

Microsoft used to be a similar purpose-driven company, with the mission of putting “a computer on every desk and in every home.” That was an expansive goal that served humanity. But a lot of people now believe Microsoft has lost its way, and sometimes it acts more like a cancerous tumor than a servant to humanity. Do you believe that Microsoft is here to serve humanity, or mainly itself? Is it working with the expansion and evolution of humanity, or is it working against it? Probably a bit of both. Hence its mixed results and recent stagnation. Microsoft needs a new mission that aligns with humanity’s expansion. So far its current attempts at a new mission have been fluffy and noncommittal. It wastes too much energy on trying to defend its turf, failing to recognize that there’s only one turf, and it belongs to universal consciousness. If you happen to work for Microsoft, do what you can to wake more people up within your company, and eventually the culture will shift, as will the company’s results.

The irony is that companies that care less about quarterly returns and more about service to humanity can often achieve amazing growth. Why? Because humanity wants those companies to succeed. It sends them whatever resources they need to succeed.

Notice which companies appear to be serving the expansion and evolution of humanity and which are only here to serve themselves and their stockholders. If you were a genius, which kind of company would you want to work for? If you were humanity itself, which companies would you support? Which would you ignore? Which would you wish to tear down or transform? Now what kind of company do you currently work for?

* * *

Martin Luther King, Jr. said that we have guided missiles and misguided men. Let’s change that. Guidance is available to you whenever you want. You just have to be reasonably awake to receive it. Then you’ll have all the inspiration you could possibly want.

Uncopyrighted by Steve Pavlina

This certainly won’t be my first sleep experiment. I’ve previously written about becoming an early riser, and I did polyphasic sleep for 5-1/2 months in 2005-2006.

Polyphasic sleep was an amazing — but immensely strange — experience. This involved sleeping 20 minutes at a time, every 4 hours, around the clock, so that’s only 2 hours of sleep out of every 24 hours. The first week involved some hellish sleep deprivation, but it became much easier once I adapted.

What I disliked about polyphasic sleep was the rigidity of it. Naps had to be taken on a fairly rigid schedule, so activities had to be slotted into 3 hour and 40 minute periods of wakefulness. I could shift the naps around a little from time to time, but missing even one nap could mean feeling worn out for several more cycles. Another factor I disliked was the strange disconnection I felt with other human beings who had to hibernate every night while I was awake. Looking back, I’m a bit amazed that I kept it up for so long, but after the first month, it had become a habit, so even though it was challenging, I was somewhat used to it by then.

My Biphasic Sleep Trial

Biphasic sleep has many variations. The version I’m trying will probably look something like this:

12:30-5:00 am – core sleep (4.5 hours)

6:00-7:30 pm – nap (1.5 hours)

I feel good about the core sleep period. I might try reducing the amount of time later, but I’ll stick with 4.5 hours at least during the adaptation. I normally get up at 5am every day, so I think it gives me an advantage to keep the same wake up time with biphasic sleep. And it doesn’t seem that difficult in principle to stay up a couple hours later than usual.

I’m not sure about the best time to schedule the nap, however. I chose this time partly based on what I learned from other successful biphasic sleepers and partly based on what fits well into my schedule. I’m willing to shift it earlier or later based on how I feel though. I suspect it may take some experimentation to learn what works best for me.

Based on the logs of biphasic sleep trials, it appears that adapting to biphasic sleep is very mild compared to adapting to polyphasic sleep. One person described it as feeling like having jetlag for a week. I think I can handle that. I’ve kept my schedule fairly light this week in terms of scheduled obligations, so it’s a good week to make the attempt.

Why Biphasic Sleep?

My motivation is pretty simple. I want to see if I can have the best of both worlds — to remain an early riser while also being able to stay up later at night.

If I have to choose one or the other, I’d prefer to remain an early riser. I LOVE getting up before dawn every morning. I enjoy going to the gym when it’s not so crowded and driving home afterwards while it’s still dark. I like having my breakfast smoothie while the sun is rising. It feels great to get an early start to my day.

If I sleep in past sunrise, I feel lazy and unproductive, and my motivation drops. If I roll out of bed at 7am, I feel like I’m starting my day way behind.

But I also live in Las Vegas, and people who come to town usually want to hang out later than 10pm each night. There are many interesting social opportunities that would require staying up past my bedtime.

In the past I would sometimes switch to being a night owl for a bit, and then I’d adapt back to being an early riser afterwards. I don’t like doing that so much though. Sometimes I’d decline late night social opportunities because I didn’t want to throw off my sleep schedule. I know that I feel much better when I get up early, and I don’t want to be sleep deprived the next day.

There are also some things I’d like to do that aren’t practical for an early riser, such as going out dancing. Rachelle and I had a wonderful time dancing in New Orleans earlier this year, and we’d love to do more of that… maybe take some lessons and learn different styles too. But the Vegas clubs don’t open till 10pm, so in order to make this happen, I have to throw off my sleep schedule.

So I would love it if I had a sleep schedule that allowed me to enjoy being an early riser while also allowing me to stay up late at night — and without messing up the routine and/or leaving me feeling sleep deprived.

Biphasic sleep looks like a promising candidate for a solution, so I’m excited to try it out and see how it goes. Taking a nap in the early evening doesn’t seem like too big a sacrifice, and I may have some flexibility in when I take it. I could even do a full-day workshop during the day and then nap afterwards. Also, I can probably skip the nap if it’s too inconvenient and just sleep monophasically the next night. And I always have the option of going off schedule and dealing with the consequences later.

Another benefit to biphasic sleep is that you can get by with a bit less sleep, and some people report feeling a lot better on biphasic sleep than on monophasic. I’m not overly concerned with the extra waking time, but I am curious to see if I feel more energetic than usual on biphasic sleep. If it feels good, I’ll be more inclined to stick with it.

Biphasic sleep is another tool I want to add to my personal growth toolbox. There may be some times in my life when it works well and other times when it’s not needed. I feel like I’m currently in one of those times where it could be very useful.

Self-Discipline vs. Spontaneity

It can be tricky to achieve a healthy balance between self-discipline and spontaneity. If you’re too disciplined, you can become overly rigid and miss some wonderful growth opportunities. But if you’re too spontaneous, then your life may become messy and unfocused, struggling to get ahead. Disciplined, focused efforts can create some wonderful long-term payoffs, such as multiple streams of passive income that render a time-sucking job completely unnecessary. It takes a careful balance between these two factors to create a life of freedom and fulfillment.

If my biphasic sleep schedule works and I like it, then I can enjoy the best of both worlds — maintaining a regular, disciplined sleep schedule while also being able to enjoy the spontaneity of staying out late with friends, going dancing, etc. I know that for some people, staying up just past midnight isn’t late, and I’ve had my share of nights out that didn’t end till after dawn, but it wouldn’t make me happy to do that on a regular basis. I did enough of that to last a lifetime during my teens and 20s. In my 30s I fell in love with self-discipline.

Self-discipline pays off with the opportunity to be more spontaneous. It’s much easier for me to be spontaneous when you have full control of your schedule and don’t need a job. So if you like spontaneity, you’d better fall in love with self-discipline, or you’ll probably end up stuck working hard to fulfill someone else’s desire for more spontaneity.

Being spontaneous also makes it easier to be disciplined. If all you see before you is work, work, and more work, that isn’t very motivating. But if you make an effort to have fun, take unplanned trips, and live by the seat of your pants on occasion, you’ll burn off a lot of stress, and your motivation will increase. Happiness is a lot more motivating than tension.

Already Underway

I started doing biphasic sleep yesterday, so I’m presently on Day 2. Yesterday I took a nap in the afternoon and then went to bed at 12:30am as planned. I got up at 5am and felt a bit more groggy than usual, but it wasn’t too bad. I went about my usual morning routine and didn’t have any problems. It’s almost 1pm now, and I’m still feeling pretty good.

To make the adaptation easier, I’m sticking with a mostly raw diet (and all vegan of course, as I’ve been doing for 14+ years), heavy on the fresh juice, and caffeine-free. I made 2 quarts of juice this morning (carrot-apple-celery-romaine-dandelion-ginger-lime), so that will be about 50% of my calories for the day from juice. The benefit of juice is that it takes very little energy to digest, so it’s less of a drain on the body. I know from experience with polyphasic sleep and various dietary experiments that when I eat mostly fresh fruits and veggies and fresh juices, I don’t need as much sleep, and I feel more energetic during the day. My heart rate is also lower when I exercise. So I want to give myself every advantage to minimize the feeling of sleep deprivation. I still want to get a lot done this week, so I’d rather not be a zombie if I can avoid it.

I’m not planning to blog each day of this as I go along, but I may post an update now and then if I have something interesting to share.

I’m not committing to sleeping biphasically for any particular number of days just yet. My first goal is to make it through the adaptation period and see what it feels like once my body is used to it. Once I see what it’s like, I’ll decide if I want to stick with it for a while. If I don’t like it, I won’t continue with it.

Wish me luck!

Uncopyrighted by Steve Pavlina

For example, if you’re a meat eater, then I would strongly recommend that you go hunting once in a while and eat what you kill. I think it’s important to have that experience, so you can fully appreciate your choices. If you can’t personally kill an animal and prepare it for consumption, that would signal a major internal incongruency, so perhaps it would be wise to reevaluate your food choices.

I wouldn’t say you need to do this every time you eat meat, but do it at least once a year to stay connected to the process from killing to consuming. For someone who only eats fish, then going fishing would suffice.

For a lacto-ovo vegetarian, I’d suggest having the experience of milking a cow and drinking its milk. Or visit a chicken farm and get some fresh eggs right from the source. Hang out with the cows and chickens to see what they’re like up close. Notice how you feel about taking and consuming their milk and eggs.

If you like to eat processed foods, see if you can arrange a visit to one of those food factories you’ve been supporting, and observe the production line. For example, Ethel M. Chocolates in Las Vegas offers a free factory tour with free chocolate samples at the end. Going on that tour probably won’t make you love or hate chocolate, but it may raise your awareness of the types of jobs human beings do to make gourmet chocolates. It helps raise your awareness of the consequences of your actions.

For a few years now, I’ve kept a small garden in my backyard. I’m not much of a gardener, but it’s been a learning experience to grow and consume some of my own food. I noticed that I prefer eating plants that renew themselves as opposed to pulling them out of the ground and killing them. I have some green onions, for example, that have been thriving for years. I snip off pieces here and there, and the plants auto-renew. The same goes for herbs. Fruit trees are also great because you can eat the fruit, and the plants live on and bear more fruit. I favor fresh fruit as a large part of my diet.

I can’t see myself hunting down and shooting a deer or some other animal. I’d rather watch the animal continue to live. If a lion wants to kill it, that’s fine, but I’m not a lion. If someone is going to eat meat though, then I think that hunting and eating the prey would be an essential experience to have. Otherwise it’s too likely to lower one’s awareness and slip into incongruency, which erodes self-respect over time.

I saw many deer up close on my recent road trip, along with cows and various other animals, and I never felt the desire to pull out a weapon and kill them and eat them. Instead I saw them as quite beautiful and peaceful. I wanted to sit and watch them, not end their lives.

At one point Rachelle and I got pretty close to a deer and practically had a conversation with it while we took some photos. At no point did we talk about the deer’s potential tastiness and satiety. Perhaps that’s why it allowed us to get so close, almost within petting range. Afterwards we thanked it for the photos.

I see inner congruency as a matter of degree more than essence. Improving the congruency between our values and our decisions is a lifelong process. It’s not about achieving perfection. As soon as you complete one step, you may think you’ve achieved some new level of moral godhood for a while, but shortly thereafter the next steps will present themselves.

I think about 9 billion farm animals are slaughtered for food each year in the USA. I wonder how many of those deaths would occur if the end consumers had to do the killing personally. I think we can all agree that it would be a lot less than 9 billion killings.

If you eat meat but you’ve never personally and deliberately killed and eaten an animal, and you resist even making the attempt, does that make you a chicken? Yeah, I think it does. After all, if your values support eating meat, then surely they must support the most basic process that makes it possible to eat meat: to deliberately kill an animal and eat its flesh.

There are lots of ways to extend the ideas in this article of course. Food choices are just one application. The overall point is that if you can’t bring yourself to participate in the processes you’re supporting right now through your choices, then do you really respect those processes

And if you continue to partake in processes you don’t respect, then do you really respect the choices you’re making?

And if you continue to make choices you don’t respect, then do you really respect yourself?

When you take steps to increase the congruency between your values and your choices, your self-respect increases. And with greater self-respect, you’re less likely to allow yourself to be trapped in abusive situations, and you’re more likely to maintain high standards for your life, both personally and professionally.

If your values and your choices are out of sync, it means you don’t value yourself.

Uncopyrighted by Steve Pavlina

At some point in time, I started having strong adverse reactions to something I was eating, but it took a while to track it down. I was eating 100% raw at the time, and from time to time, I’d find myself suffering from intense stomach cramping and nausea. I would retch and vomit, and then for almost 24 hours afterwards, my whole body would break out in extremely itchy hives. After that I’d be fine. It seemed clear to me that this was some kind of allergic reaction, but to what?

This happened to me repeatedly over a period of weeks, but at the time I didn’t know what was causing it. By process of elimination I was eventually able to figure out what it was with certainty — mango.

This was a huge surprise to me because I never used to be allergic to mango. I was able to eat it in large quantities just fine. After I went raw it became one of my favorite foods. But eventually I had to do without it because it would make me terribly sick.

With some trial and error, I was eventually able to figure out the following:

If I ate just one small bite of mango, I wouldn’t notice any negative effects.

If I ate about a quarter of a mango, I’d get a mild upset stomach, which would last for an hour or two, but I’d be otherwise okay. So if there was a small amount of mango mixed into something (such as mango salsa), I could eat a little of it without serious negative consequences.

If I ate about half a mango, I’d get a bad upset stomach and some nausea for a couple hours, but I’d be able to keep it down.

If I ate as much as a whole mango, I’d get a severe upset stomach followed by vomiting, and then I’d break out in hives for about a day. The hives were the worst because I’d have itchy red spots all over my body — chest, arms, face, legs, back, groin, etc.

I was seriously miffed that this happened because I really love mango. I know there are lots of varieties of mangos, and I certainly haven’t tried them all, but every type I did try had the same negative effect on me. And due to the negative symptoms, I wasn’t particularly motivated to keep trying.

So for more than a year I basically stopped eating mango altogether. I had to completely drop it from my diet. Every now and then I’d have a little bit, like if someone put mango on their salad at a raw potluck I attended, but even when I ate a small amount, I’d get an upset stomach.

I talked to a number of raw food experts about this. Most had never heard of such a thing. A couple said they’d seen it before though and that it was most likely going to be permanent.

What a bizarre problem I thought. Am I supposed to spend the rest of my life being allergic to mango now?

Well, recently I decided to try some experimenting to see if perhaps I could rebuild a tolerance to mango and be able to eat it regularly again. I opted to start small and see what would happen if I consumed a little bit of mango each day, not enough to make me seriously ill but just enough to notice some symptoms.

I’m honestly not sure if this is a good idea, but I thought I’d give it a try to see what would happen. So earlier this week I bought a 12-pack of mango kombucha, a raw fermented drink that includes mango puree. Each bottle is 12 ounces.

The first one I drank gave me a pretty strong upset stomach and some mild nausea, but it passed after about 90 minutes.

The next day I drank another one, and that time I had a mild upset stomach for about an hour but no nausea.

On the third day, I drank another one. On that occasion I noticed some odd gurgling noises in my stomach, but there was no pain, discomfort, or nausea.

Today is the fourth day, and I drank another mango kombucha a few hours ago. I heard only some minor stomach gurgling but no other adverse symptoms.

So each day the results have been getting better and better. I still have 8 bottles to go, and once I’m done with them, I’ll probably graduate to small quantities of solid mango.

This seems like such an odd problem to have, so I’m sharing this info in case someone else has a similar weird reaction with a latent food allergy that develops over time. If anyone has heard about this sort of thing, I’d love to hear about your thoughts and experiences.

In the meantime, however, I’m takin’ it back!

Uncopyrighted by Steve Pavlina

This particular yoga studio is right around the corner from my gym, so for the past week I’d drop Rachelle off for her class and then head to my gym for my usual morning workout. And each time the friendly people at the Bikram studio would offer me a free class and nudge me to try it. I had to explain to them that I never met a yoga I liked. As many of my friends know, I can be quite vocal in my distaste for all things yoga. It bores me to tears. I keep suggesting they add a sparring element to make it more engaging.

This is a fairly new studio — it just opened earlier this year — so there weren’t many students in the class. It was just Rachelle, myself, and two others (one male, one female). The next class coming in after ours seemed a bit more populous. (Hmmm… Populous… I used to spend hours playing that game. Anyone remember that one?)

This class was 90 minutes long, and it takes place in a heated room, so you sweat continuously. I think it was set to 95 degrees or so, but I’m not sure about the exact temp. (Edit — turns out 105 degrees is the standard setting for Bikram studios.) It also seemed pretty humid in there. I don’t know if the humidity was by design or if it was from the previous class sweating it up. I drank almost a quart of water and a quart of fresh carrot-apple-celery-spinach-greens-ginger-lime juice before class (but no solid food), so I was well hydrated before I got there.

The class was easier than I expected in terms of the workout. I haven’t done martial arts in a while, so my flexibility has a ways to go, but other than not being very stretchy, I didn’t find it overly difficult. My usual morning workout (intervals + weight training) is more challenging for me than this yoga class was.

I actually liked the heat. It felt good to sweat so much. Sometimes the A/C at my gym is turned up a bit high, and I found the warmth of this yoga room to be a nice change of pace. The heat wasn’t a problem for me at all, maybe because I’m used to 110-degree days during the Vegas summers. I wouldn’t have minded if they cranked up the heat a bit higher in fact.

The first half of the class was standing exercises, and the second half involved floor exercises that were done sitting or lying down. There were 26 postures in all, and we did each of them twice. Most of these postures weren’t new to me because I’ve done yoga before. But there were a few I hadn’t tried before, like the rabbit pose. The instructor talked very fast, but I was able to figure out what to do pretty quickly, partly by listening to her and partly by watching the other students.

The hardest part for me was staying silent because in group classes I tend to enjoy cracking jokes now and then. But overall I didn’t mind the policy of silence because it kept me focused on what I was doing.

I thought the workout was very relaxing and refreshing, almost like hanging out in a spa for a while. I’m sure the heat helped with getting into the stretches more deeply.

I’d expect that one of the benefits of the heat and the sweating would be better skin. Rachelle’s skin is amazingly soft and smooth, and she says it wasn’t like that before she started doing Bikram yoga. She’s been into it for about 4 years. She says that if I keep doing it, I should definitely see a difference in my skin within a few weeks or less. I can believe that.

Until today I always hated yoga, but I have to admit that I actually enjoyed this class. Afterwards I felt very energized, more than I normally would after one of my usual workouts. The class ended about 5 hours ago, and I’m still feeling more energetic than usual, both mentally and physically. My body seems more oxygenated, and it feels like I’m breathing better. My mind is in a state of relaxed alertness.

I’m considering doing a 30-day trial of Bikram yoga to see what the results are (going to class every day for 30 days in a row). I don’t think you can get a good idea of the benefits of any particular workout unless you keep it up for at least a few weeks to see if you notice any difference. I’m just not sure if that would be practical for me at this time of year because I have some travel coming up. I plan to attend another Bikram class tomorrow and make a decision on a 30-day trial a bit later. This weekend I’ll be busy doing CGW #3.

At this time I invite all the pro-Bikram people who’ve been bugging me to try this to finally indulge in their gloating session.

I still think they should add some sparring.

Uncopyrighted by Steve Pavlina

These workshops will be held at the Flamingo Hotel on the Las Vegas Strip on the following dates:

May 14-16, 2010 (Fri-Sun)
Jul 16-18, 2010 (Fri-Sun)
Oct 29-31, 2010 (Fri-Sun)

Feedback was so positive on the first two CGWs that it made sense to commit to doing many more of them. On a scale of 1-10, the average rating from CGW graduates was about a 9.

Social Abundance

One of the primary strengths of CGW is the social element. I’m still impressed by how much CGW alumni are keeping in touch with each other, both online and in person. Week after week I’m seeing CGWers encouraging each other, supporting each other, or hanging out just to have fun together.

I know of two CGW alumni who are going out to dinner tonight for raw/vegan food, even though they haven’t seen each other in a while. I get the sense that it doesn’t matter how much time passes. As part of going through the CGW experience together, people seem to develop lasting bonds very easily.

I even know of some new relationships that have formed because of CGW. I’m in that same boat myself at present.

Venue

All of the 2010 CGWs will be in the same Flamingo Hotel meeting room at the Jan 2010 CGW. That was a really nice ballroom, and unlike the room we had for CGW #1 in October, this room was big enough to do classroom-style seating with tables and chairs for everyone. (At CGW #1 we had to use theater-style — chairs only with no tables.) The room at the Flamingo also had a nice gathering space outside with lots of room for attendees to hang out and socialize before and after each day’s sessions.

I’m sticking with Las Vegas for now since I think it’s an ideal location for these workshops. We do various social fieldwork exercises in this environment, and it’s a fun place to enjoy after hours for those who are interested. At previous CGWs many attendees got together in groups to go out to dinner, see shows, go dancing, and do other fun things in the city.

If you attend the October workshop, that could be especially fun since the final day is Halloween, and many people dress up in costume and parade around the Strip that night.

To help you make travel plans (air travel, hotel, transportation to the event), check out the extensive Workshop FAQ. It includes links to various resources to help you plan your stay.

Pricing

Despite urgings from some of my friends that I should raise the price to $1000-2000, I’m stubbornly keeping the price the same: $497 USD if you register at least 30 days in advance, $597 if you register less than 30 days before a workshop. This is to make sure we have a reasonable idea of the expected attendance within 30 days before the event for planning and execution purposes.

This pricing is definitely on the low side for 3-day personal growth workshop. Many of my friends in this field would charge at least double that (and they’ve told me so). The main reason I’m able to keep the price so low is that my marketing costs are virtually nonexistent. We were able to fill up the past two CGWs just by promoting them on my blog, newsletter, Erin’s blog, Erin’s newsletter, Twitter, and Facebook — none of which cost us anything. Typically for a workshop of this type, marketing is the single biggest expense. So this is a nice way I can leverage my online resources to keep the costs low. Otherwise if I had some serious marketing expenses to lay out, I probably would charge at least $1000 for this workshop.

I also think that if we keep the price low relative to the value being provided, it will generate more word of mouth from attendees, which means even more free marketing. This is the same basic strategy I used to build my blog traffic — deliver high value at an unbeatable price.

CGW Photos

You can see some pics of previous CGWs in my Facebook photos if you’d like. They’re on the first couple pages of the main photo section, not in one of the albums. There are also some pics of post-workshop gatherings with CGW alumni. I doubt the pics capture the essence of the experience, but they’re there if you care to take a peek.

Sign Up!

If you want to attend a CGW this year, go ahead and register. It only takes a minute, and then you know you’ll be there. Please don’t wait till the last minute since there’s always a chance that your preferred date will sell out.

Hotel rates at the Flamingo are pretty reasonable right now ($100 per night or less on average), but room rates tend to go up a few weeks before the stay dates, so it’s best to reserve your hotel room well in advance. If you reserve with a credit card, you usually won’t be billed for the hotel until your stay, so there’s no reason to procrastinate. You can reserve a room at the CGW venue hotel online very quickly on the Flamingo Hotel’s website. You can select the dates of your stay right on their home page. It only takes a few minutes.

One last time, here’s the link to learn more about CGW and sign up: Conscious Growth Workshop.

I look forward to seeing you there for an awesome life-changing experience!

Uncopyrighted by Steve Pavlina

Dozens of people have already registered, including many return attendees from the previous CGW, so it’s great to know that we’ll have another amazing international group. At the first CGW, about 1/3 of the participants came from outside the USA.

Workshop Details

All the workshop details can be found on the Conscious Growth Workshop page, including the specific topics we’ll be covering each day.

This will be a very holistic workshop, blending high-level ideas with practical application. We’re going to cover career development, money, health, skill building, habits, productivity, emotions, relationships, spirituality, and more. I’ll be sharing the best insights I have on each of these topics. My goal is not to send you home with pages and pages of notes that you’ll hopefully implement later. This workshop is geared to create many a-ha moments that shift your thinking right there in the workshop.

Erin’s Role

As with the previous workshop, Erin will be helping to facilitate and will be contributing on stage as well.

Although Erin and I are now separated, we continue to maintain a positive, loving relationship with each other. In October we made the conscious decision to separate in order to break free from patterns in our marriage that weren’t working for us. This is giving us the space to re-explore our connection from a new angle.

Based on the feedback we’ve received about our separation, it’s clear that some people are having a hard time understanding how Erin and I can still be best friends, still love each other, and still happily work together. The best explanation I can offer is that conscious relationships don’t necessarily fit into standard social labels. They can twist and turn in unusual ways. The path with a heart usually isn’t a paved road.

Erin and I continue to connect in all the ways that are working for us, but we’ve taken the opportunity to disconnect in those areas where we aren’t as compatible. This notion comes directly from the second principle of conscious growth: Love.

At the January CGW, Erin and I will be conducting the relationship segment together, just as we did at the previous CGW. We’ll share what we’ve learned from our 15+ years together, including what we’ve learned thus far during our separation. We’ll explain how we apply the principles of conscious growth to continue to love and support each other even as our relationship has changed form.

Workshop FAQ

If you have questions about the workshop, please consult the Workshop FAQ first. It packs in a lot of info about the workshop, travel arrangements, hotels, and staying in Las Vegas.

Workshop Forums

If you have questions about the workshop, feel free to post them in the Conscious Growth Workshop discussion forum. This is a great place to interact with CGW alumni if you want to learn about their experiences. You can read plenty of feedback from them about the previous CGW as well.

Some CGW attendees are also discussing various social gatherings for hanging out together informally outside workshop hours.

Conscious Growth Is Honest Growth

If you’re looking for a guru who offers only the cleanest, neatest answers that align well with society’s standards, don’t come to CGW. That isn’t a role I can ever fill. What I offer you is honesty.

Anyone can grow unconsciously — that happens automatically just by living your life. But conscious growth means that you’ve become an active co-creator of your own life experiences. You decide what your career, finances, health, relationships, etc. will look like next, and then you take on the challenge of making those desires a reality. This is a very difficult undertaking, but it’s also extremely rewarding.

There are so many different aspects to conscious growth — making decisions, applying willpower, cultivating a supportive environment, maintaining momentum, and so on — that very often you may find yourself feeling confused, frustrated, or simply overwhelmed.

What we teach at CGW is how to understand the big picture of conscious growth. My role is to simplify the process to a core set of universal principles that you can understand and apply under real-world conditions. So whenever you get stuck or confused, you can return to these principles time and time again to get unstuck. The principles not only allow you to diagnose any personal or professional problem, but they also show you what specific actions to take in order to get moving in a positive direction.

If this is the kind of life experience you’re ready for, then I can offer you no better way of getting there than to attend the Conscious Growth Workshop in January. And be sure to sign up today to save $100 on your registration.

See you in Vegas!

Uncopyrighted by Steve Pavlina

Making this video was totally spontaneous, so we got a bit silly at times. Hope you enjoy it.

I make the zucchini hummus differently each time. This time I blended in some sun dried tomatoes and fresh basil. I also like making it with red pepper and parsley. When I want it spicy, I throw in some hot peppers. I typically use this hummus as a dip for carrots and/or celery.

Lori’s coconut-banana cream pie was especially popular at the potluck — there were no leftovers for us to take home.

I made the raw lemon meringue pie once again for a raw Thanksgiving potluck. Aside from soaking the Irish moss and cashews in advance, it takes about an hour to make. For a raw dessert it’s really good. The lemon filling only has 4 ingredients: lemon juice, Irish moss, agave nectar, and a pinch of turmeric. The pie crust is nothing but macadamia nuts and sea salt. And the meringue topping is made from coconut, cashews, and a bunch of other ingredients.

I ran some of the pesto balls through my dehydrator afterwards for about 12 hours. I liked them even better than the pre-dehydrated versions shown in the video. They came out crispy on the outside and moist on the inside, and a little dehydration made the flavors even stronger. I can’t share the recipe because we just kept adding stuff to them until the flavor seemed to be just right.

On a typical day I tend to eat very simple meals (like green smoothies, fresh fruit, salads, carrots and guacamole). I don’t eat complex foods like the ones in the video on a regular basis. But I often make something special for a raw potluck because it’s fun to share it with others.

I never used to enjoy cooking, but I love making creative raw dishes these days. I’ve done a lot of experimenting over the past two years to figure out what food combinations work well together.

Lori refers to me as her “partner in crime” in the video because we both used to shoplift in our late teens. Fortunately we’ve managed to redirect our criminal masterminding skills to the creation of delicious raw food treats.

Uncopyrighted by Steve Pavlina

Drinking fresh juice has many benefits. With the fiber removed, fresh juice digests very easily, so you don’t have to expend as much energy on digestion. This extra energy then becomes available for your body and mind.

When I incorporate a lot of juice into my diet — about 32-64 oz per day, roughly 25-50% of my day’s caloric intake — I immediately notice a difference at the gym. My body just feels lighter and cleaner, and exercising feels easier as well.

Juicing and interval training

Lately I’ve been doing interval training at the gym on an elliptical machine. I know from past experience that interval training is an effective way to boost my cardiovascular fitness level in a matter of weeks. I’ve also shed several pounds this month.

For interval training I like my baseline heart rate to be around 148 beats per minute. Then I do various short intervals (usually 1-2 minutes in duration) that spike my heart rate as high as 180. Over a period of weeks, this training makes my cardiovascular system progressively more efficient, so my heart doesn’t have to pump as hard to handle the same workload. The effect is easily measurable with a heart rate monitor.

Four weeks ago I started out at level 10 for my baseline on a particular brand of elliptical machine. Sustained exertion at that level would get my heart up to about 146-148 beats per minute. Today that same setting will only get my heart rate into the 120s. To hit 148, I have to set the machine to level 14 now.

Also, four weeks ago I was doing intervals between levels 10 and 14. Now I’m doing intervals between levels 14 and 20 to create similar spikes in my heart rate.

How does juicing play into this? Well, I recently observed that if I drank a lot of juice the day before my workout (as opposed to all solid foods), my heart rate wouldn’t spike as high during the intervals.

Presently at level 14, my heart rate will be sustained at around 147 beats per minute. I don’t notice a change in that number whether I’m juicing or not. However, after a minute at level 19, my heart rate has been spiking to 177. But if I drink lots of juice the day before (about 64 oz), that same interval only spikes my heart rate to 163, and a minute at level 20 only spikes me to 171. If I go back to all solid food (including smoothies), then my heart rate spikes back up to 176-177 for that same level 19 interval. I don’t push it to level 20 on those days because I don’t like going past 180 (that puts me a little too close to passing out or throwing up).

So not only do I feel the difference when I’m juicing, I can also measure it at the gym when I’m working out. My heart doesn’t have to pump as hard to handle the same workload when I’m getting more of my calories from fresh juice.

If you’re curious if this would work for store-bought juice, I haven’t tried that. Pasteurized (i.e. cooked) juice isn’t something I want to put in my body.

I’ve also noticed that if I have a smaller amount of juice (like 24-32 oz), then the training benefit is diminished but still measurable. I haven’t tried going a full day on juice, which for me would require about 128 oz (1 gallon), but I may try that at some point to see if the effect is even greater.

Of course there’s a training effect whereby interval training helps my body adapt to greater workloads over time, but this effect isn’t too significant in the span of just a few days. By flip-flopping from juicy days to non-juicy days now and then (something I did simply by accident), I was able to get a reasonable idea of how my previous day’s diet affects me at the gym the next morning.

I don’t think this is because the juice is medicinal per se. I think the reason is that when I drink more juice, I eat less solid food, so my body doesn’t need as much energy for digestion, but I’m still getting adequate calories, so it’s not like I’m fasting. Digesting solid food also generates a lot more metabolic waste, some of which may be making my cardiovascular system and my muscles less efficient. The less energy my body has to expend on digestion and waste management, the more efficiently it works when I’m exercising.

Since I can push myself a bit harder when juicing — without causing my heart to explode — this makes my interval training more efficient. I’m able to burn more calories in the same amount of time. Beyond that, it’s hard to measure the long-term training impact as an individual trainee, but I can’t see it being a bad thing.

I’m eating 90-100% raw these days (and always 100% vegan), so I can’t say what effect juicing would have if you eat a diet heavy in cooked and/or processed foods. I suspect it may have an even greater impact though since you’d be crowding out foods that create a much greater digestive burden and which generate significantly more metabolic waste. However, if you jump right into it from a heavier diet, you might trigger a detox effect for the first week or two and feel a bit weaker during that time.

Juicing and weight training

What about weight training? Does juicing have an effect on that too? I haven’t been able to measure that yet because I’ve been so focused on interval training lately. I just added weight training back into my exercise routine today. This morning I did 30 minutes of interval training (including 5 minutes of warm-up and 5 minutes of cool-down), then 35 minutes of weight training, 10 minutes of basic stretching, and 20 minutes of yoga.

In the past I’ve noticed an obvious benefit to weight training on a diet of raw food vs. cooked food. I can lift more weight, and I have more muscular endurance (i.e. I can do more reps at the same weight) when I eat raw. I also don’t feel as tired during or after my workouts. As soon as I add back a little cooked food, like some cooked potatoes, I become a little weaker. I can’t lift as much weight or go as long.

Another cool benefit I’ve noticed is that my strength doesn’t degrade as much during periods when I’m not actively weight training if I’m eating high-raw or all-raw during those times. Normally on a cooked food diet, if I took several months off from weight training, I’d lose a lot of strength from atrophy, and it would take me at least a month or two to build back up to my previous high.

On a raw food diet, I seem to retain most of my strength gains even when I don’t train for months. This morning when I started weight training again after taking a lot of time off from it, I was pretty close to my previous max on most exercises. My chest seemed to have the most degradation, whereas my biceps were just as strong as they were a few months ago.

I don’t exactly know why this is so. Perhaps it’s because cleaner burning foods generate less metabolic waste, so there isn’t as much waste build-up in the muscles during non-training periods. Initially though, the training effect tends to be more neurological than muscular, whereby more muscle fibers get activated (as opposed to building new muscle tissue via hypertrophy). So perhaps with cleaner burning foods, the mind doesn’t find it as necessary to de-activate as many of the muscle fibers when training stops. Perhaps that de-activation process gets triggered to help free up resources to handle waste management with the higher toxic load from cooked foods. I’m just postulating here — quite honestly I haven’t a clue as to what’s really going on. But I’ve seen a marked difference in how my own body behaves on raw vs. cooked foods, and I rather like it, so I wanted to share it in the hopes that it may benefit you as well.

Making delicious juices

I tend to make fairly complex juices because I love how the different flavors combine. Even if I use the exact same ingredients, every juice comes out unique.

As I write this article, I’m drinking 34 oz of carrot, apple, beet, celery, mixed greens, dandelion greens, kale, parsley, ginger, lime, pomegranate juice. It takes me about 20 minutes to make that much juice, including prep and clean-up.

I frequently use 6-7 medium-sized carrots and an apple as a base for a 32-oz juice (one quart). It has a pleasant flavor and guarantees a sweet-tasting juice no matter what I add to it. When I start with carrot-apple, it’s hard to screw it up.

If I want a slightly sweeter, earthier juice, I’ll add 1/2 to 1 beet to it. I juice the beet greens too.

Carrots, apples, and beets are all high in natural sugar, so you can use them in any combination to create a sweet base for a juice that will effectively mask stronger flavors like those of bitter greens. Over time you may wish to decrease the quantity of these ingredients as your palate adjusts.

Celery, cucumber, and romaine lettuce make nice alkalizing additions to any juice. They’re mild in flavor, so they won’t overpower your juice. Usually I’ll include at least 4 stalks of celery and/or a small cucumber. Sometimes I’ll juice a whole head of celery. These foods are very water-rich, so they’re great to use for adding volume to a juice if you want to make a lot of juice quickly without a lot of prep work. Because of their mild flavors, they won’t wreck the flavor of your juice no matter how much you use.

Romaine lettuce (and most other lettuces) also have a mild flavor when juiced, so that’s another good ingredient to use frequently.

Next I include some dark greens, usually at least 2-3 different types. My favorites include spinach, dandelion greens, kale (especially dinosaur kale), beet greens, and parsley, mainly because they’re easy to feed into my Green Star juicer. Sometimes I’ll use mixed greens, Swiss chard, or collard greens. Dark greens tend to have a very strong flavor when juiced, so I don’t recommend trying to drink them straight. You’ll want something to mask their bitterness. Carrot-apple does a great job of that, so you can include a lot of greens while still enjoying an extremely palatable juice.

Lastly I add a few ingredients to create more sizzle and spike up the flavor. My favorites are lime and ginger — it’s rare that I make a juice w/o one or both of them. I normally use 1/4 to 1/2 of a lime plus 1-2 tsp of fresh ginger for a 32-oz juice. Sometimes I use lemon, but I almost always prefer lime. You can juice the lemon and lime with the skin too — and the ginger as well.

Other flavor-spiking ingredients I use are pomegranate seeds (several tablespoons), kiwi (one or two of them), and fennel (1-2 sprigs). Some people like to toss in a clove of garlic or some hot peppers, but I’m not really into that. Don’t use onion though — even a small amount of onion can overpower a juice and make it taste pretty nasty. I learned that lesson the hard way.

When I want to clean out my fridge, I will sometimes toss in a zucchini, sprouts, some cabbage, or some bell pepper (any color). Most water-rich produce can be juiced, but not all juicers can accommodate every type of produce. For example, my juicer doesn’t handle tomatoes or pineapples well because they clog the mesh filter.

Many juice-loving friends of mine prefer to make much simpler juices with only 3-4 ingredients, such as cucumber, celery, romaine juice or carrot, romaine, spinach. I sometimes make such juices too, but I seem to keep going back to the complex ones with 10-12 ingredients. I just love how the different items combine to create an explosive layering of different flavors and sensations.

My favorite simple juice is probably pineapple-garlic juice. I blend one pineapple (minus the skin) plus 3 garlic cloves in my Vita-Mix and then run it through a nut milk bag to remove the pulp. I know it probably sounds disgusting, but it’s quite delicious. Since it’s mostly pineapple juice, the garlic adds an interesting accent. When I drink this juice, however, I can expect to smell like garlic for 2-3 days afterwards. Raw garlic is pretty potent!

Try it for yourself

If you enjoy physical training or if you’re just curious about juicing, try incorporating more fresh juice into your diet to see if you notice a difference in your workouts. I suspect that at the very least, you’ll notice that exercising feels a little easier, so you can push yourself a bit harder each time.

Note that juicing is different from blending up a smoothie. With a smoothie the fiber remains intact, but with juicing the fiber is removed as pulp. I even run my juice through a nut milk bag just to remove the last bits of fiber that made it through my juicer.

If you don’t have a juicer yet, read the section on Juice Feasting Equipment from my juice feasting article for some recommendations on how to get started.

Uncopyrighted by Steve Pavlina