At turn of the new year, I was not feeling my best self. After a month of holiday parties and gluttony, I decided I needed to completely change my internal world, and so I cut sugar (for 21 days), alcohol (28 days), and caffeine (34 days) out of my diet. Harder than cutting out wine, whiskey, and/or the occasional beer was removing sugar from my diet. With the removal of these elements from my diet, however, towards the end of the second week I began to think and feel remarkably clear. Like a clear channel or frequency, it was as if information and creative ideas were flowing into my mind unobstructed.
In addition to changing my diet, I also began meditating twice a day. One night in meditation during the end of the second week, the idea came to me to write down a bunch of words on a piece of paper that had highly elevated emotional quotients, throw them into a bowl, choose one every day, and try to embody that energy. The idea seemed to complement my attempt to create a new baseline of feeling good within my internal environment.
When I told my 20-year-old nephew Jack, who is a musician and scored the soundtrack of my book trailer (not to mention has created an incredible unreleased soundtrack to my book) expressed an interest in the exercise, I decided I needed to think it through so I could more properly formalize it. And so that Saturday I went to a coffee shop and created The Being Experiment.
The next day I found myself thinking, what the hell—I’m gonna send this out to friends and see if anyone is into it. Comprised of 13 – 70 years olds, I wrote an email to about 50 friends. This ‘beta’ group of people resided in eight countries on four continents, and in the email, I included the following message:
What Is The Being Experiment?
In short, it’s a social experiment and an exercise in mindfulness. If you participate, however, I think you’re going to find it’s a lot more than both.
How It Works
Formatted in the attached Word Doc are 72 words that represent elevated emotions or expansive states of being.
Print out these three sheets and cut the words into squares. Next fold the squares in half and throw them in a bowl or a bag (like you would do for charades).
Put this bowl somewhere where you will see it in the morning.
Before you leave the house, pick a word from the bowl.
Your job then is to contemplate, interpret, act, and/or be the embodiment of that word, either for the whole day or at least in one instance.
I went on to say that I suspected participants would find it to be a creative process, because at times it will require a change in their being, habits, and/or energy—and when you change your energy, you change your reality. It’s my belief that like attracts like, so as a result of you embodying the energy of these elevated emotions and states of being, you’re going to pull interesting people, experiences, opportunities, synchronicities, and/or serendipities into your life that are a vibrational match to those elevated emotions.
After I sent out my email, I created a Closed Group on Facebook and invited the 25 or so people who answered the email. I figured it would be interesting for people to share their experiences and be inspired by others. Much to my surprise, by the end of the day there were 160 members, and as of publishing this, there are 680+ members. Today I made the group open to the public. You can join the Facebook group if you like or connect here on Instagram.
I’m also happy to report that The Being Experiment is now trademarked and is being developed with a partner into an app and a physical product. If you’re an app developer and/or a digital designer and would be interested in being involved, drop me a line. Let’s work something out.
Please drop me a line or add a comment below if you've had any interesting experiences as result of The Being Experiment.
Happy creating!
Have you watched my book trailer or explored the excerpts?