My Journey to Effortlessness

There have been lots of changes in my personal life over the last several months. I’ve had a lot of realizations, and dealt with a lot of challenges.

The one thing that I’ve realized the most — which should be of no surprise to you if you are familiar with my work — is that effortlessness is the key to everything.

I’ve made a serious commitment to live an absolutely effortless life.

I don’t just mean this in a superficial way. I don’t mean that I’ve committed to trying to be easier about life.

I mean that I’ve made a 100% commitment to living an absolutely effortless life, and enjoying effortless abundance, success, joy, and everything else that I want. That means that I will do absolutely nothing that feels like effort or which does not bring me joy, whether that’s working, writing a post, or doing anything else. If it is not absolutely effortless, I will not do it in that moment.

I plan on exploring the nature of effortlessness. I 100% believe that the nature of the Universe is effortless abundance and joy and plan to prove it to myself.

And in so doing I wanted to keep a journal of my journey of effortlessness. I decided to keep it public since I believe others can benefit from this as well, whether you decide to join me on this journey or not.

The Nature of the Universe is Effortlessness

If you look all around you, you can see that effortlessness is the very nature of the universe.

The Earth doesn’t have to try to revolve around the Sun. In fact, the Earth is actually constantly falling towards the Sun, but its constant movement keeps it from doing so.

Rivers don’t try to flow downhill. It is just their nature to do so. They will flow downhill until they reach the ocean.

This is the quality of the Tao. In the Tao, all things are perfectly balanced, perfectly aligned, perfectly effortless.

We just don’t realize this as humans, because we tend to put in so much effort. We work against the Tao, trying to make things happen, trying to control our environment.

Yet does that really accomplish anything but misery and disorder?

We believe that it’s our job to make things happen. We feel like we’re accomplishing nothing if we don’t try to achieve things by our own power.

But, that’s not true. We are creators, not doers. Creation is an internal, effortless act, while doing is external and full of effort.

Life is perfect, when left to its own devices. If we got out of the way and allowed Life to do what it does, our experience of reality would tend towards perfection, the more we let go.

Life is meant to be effortless. And the nature of Life is abundance, joy, happiness, success, and all the rest that you’ve been searching for.

The Nature of Life Is Abundance

You see, so many people work so hard to try to get abundance, happiness, love, success, etc. But the truth is that all these things exist all around and within us already. We literally need to do nothing whatsoever to have all the abundance we could want.

The question is not how much abundance we can earn or forcibly bring into our lives. The question is how much abundance we can allow into our experience.

It’s like sitting next to a stream with an empty glass, believing there is no water. We wonder how we might be able to get some water, where the closest store might be, etc. Yet if we just dipped the glass in the stream, we’d have an infinite supply of water. That act takes no effort at all, and yet countless gallons of water are at our disposal.

We work jobs we hate, which repress our true being and deny our innate purpose, just to get a trickle of abundance. Do you think 30K a year, or even 50K, 70K, 100K, etc, are significant levels of abundance? Yet there are people out there who make that in mere days or even hours.

The same principle goes for everything else, too. Some people will put up with less than ideal relationships, only to receive a trickle of love. Yet an entire ocean of love is available to anyone, which can easily manifest as the best relationship for you if you should so choose.

The bottom line is, we work so hard and deny ourselves so much just to get a mere trickle of what life could easily and effortlessly provide an abundance of, if we would only open up and stop trying so hard.

My Promise to Myself

I’ve been teaching these principles for going on 5 years now. I’ve tested and retested them for myself. I know they work, every time.

Yet I did not transform my whole life. I still had limiting beliefs that were holding me back and causing me to allow into my life far less than I could. I was putting forth massive effort just to get a trickle of the things I wanted most.

I got the financial abundance I had been searching for, but failed to specify that it should be joyful and effortless. I started working 3 years ago as a full-time programmer (minus a few months where I took off). My first job paid too little and was stressful, and my second job, while paying much more, was far more stressful and harmful to my mental health.

Three years of repressing my true nature and denying my purpose caused me to fall into depression, have debilitating anxiety, and just be constantly energetically drained. But I didn’t see a way out. It felt like tons of effort, and I knew it shouldn’t, but I didn’t know how to reconcile that.

I even tried just to accept that this would be my life. It helped for a bit, but my soul would always express its dissatisfaction with my path. I came extremely close to quitting several times, and to be fair, the Universe stopped me a few times for whatever reason, I believe because I wasn’t ready to quit yet.

But my new promise to myself is that I will live an absolutely effortless, joyful, and abundant life with ease. I will do nothing that is not effortless or joyful to me.

The decision came up a week ago that I just needed to quit. I don’t quite know where it came from, but it was just a knowledge deep within. I planned to do it by the end of the week.

Then this past Wednesday, January 29, I woke up and just knew: today was the day. I expected to feel trepidation, hesitation, or anything else, but I didn’t. I messaged my boss that I wanted to chat, and let him know I planned to quit.

I meant to give my two-week notice, but things turned out that this was actually my last week.

How did I feel? Absolutely amazing. Words cannot describe the pure joy of just being free. I literally slept most of the day yesterday because I think my body is just recovering from all the stress. But yesterday morning, the first day after quitting officially, I woke up and just felt so wonderful, I just wanted to celebrate.

I wasn’t willing to compromise my being any longer, so I stopped. I said, “This is enough.” I have tortured myself enough. Now it’s time for me to be happy.

Am I being irresponsible? After all, I do not have another job lined up, and don’t plan on it in the near future.

I do have savings to rely on for a while. But my plan is quite seriously to tap into the infinite abundance of life that I know is there and have experienced so many times before, and just allow it to effortlessly provide for me.

What if we didn’t have to trade energy for money? What if abundance could just be a fact of existence? What if there was no division between “work” and the rest of life, but all of life was wonderfully joyful? What if I didn’t have to do anything just for the money, but could always and ever do only that which brought me joy? What if the money was a secondary concern, or even not a concern at all, because I just trusted that it would show up?

That’s not to say I’ll deny money that is offered to me, obviously. Money, as a manifestation of abundance, has infinite ways of flowing into our lives. Someone might sign up for coaching, purchase a course I’ve created, and all that is a sign of infinite abundance. But their signing up is not my concern. I will do what I want to do and trust the abundance to be there.

This is my new promise to myself. I will return to Zero — that state of absolute stillness, peace, effortlessness, and abundance at the core of every one of us. I will allow the Universe to support me. I will not try to figure out the “how” of getting from A to B: I will simply hold the destination in mind and know that all the forces of the Universe are conspiring to bring me there in the most effortless, joyful way possible.

And yes, I believe this so deeply, so purely that I literally quit my full-time job to prove it to myself. Am I crazy? Once I would have thought so. Today I believe I have just had enough of the old way of doing things, and am determined to wake up to my own limitlessness.

Lester Levenson, at the lowest point of his life, was at the edge of death. But instead of accepting death, he took 3 months and just let go of everything that caused him stress and suffering. And, he tapped into the natural health, abundance, and joy of the Universe.

So I’ve privately been thinking of this as my Lester Levenson moment, since I believe if I had continued on with my job, my physical health likely would have started to decline right along with my mental health. This is my point of no return when I just have to decide that I will be abundant.

Looking Toward the Future

I have two things to announce as it regards to this site.

If you’ve been following me for a while, you’ve doubtlessly noticed that I’ve more or less neglected the site.

Part of that was because I’ve actually started another site called Possible Promise, where I discuss the more practical side of wealth, such as investing, budgeting, and the like. And sometimes I even discuss programming because, after all, I am still a programmer.

But also, I just didn’t have the energy to keep going on this site. The energy just wasn’t there, and I didn’t know where I wanted to take it. I think I was going through my own metamorphosis, so I didn’t have any fresh inspiration to share quite yet, until today of course.

But now I have a new vision for the future. I want to explore the nature of effortlessness and abundance, which exist at the core of all beings. Above I called it the Tao, but I most frequently call it Zero.

I’ve talked about the Zero State for years. Zero, to me, is a place of absolute stillness, perfect peace, and total effortlessness. It’s a place of no attachments and no aversions, no clinging and no resisting. If we could just live at Zero, then we would be perfectly joyful, and all the things that we wanted would simply fall into our lap effortlessly and instantaneously.

Zero is our natural state. It’s how we were meant to live. This is my commitment to myself, as I have mentioned, and I’d like to explore it here as well.

As such, I’ve decided to rebrand the site. Sorry, I know this is just a year after renaming it to Dark Ascent. But, this new period of my life just doesn’t match the old energy of Dark Ascent. With Dark Ascent I wanted to show you that you are the God of your reality — that you have absolute control. And I still believe that.

But it has too much of an active sense about it. Creation is not about forcing things to happen: it is about allowing them to happen. Dark Ascent felt very forceful, which was appropriate for a certain period of my life, but is no longer applicable.

So I am renaming it to: Returning to Zero. That’s what this is all about for me: the return to that place where all things are possible and all things are effortlessly provided for us. It’s to stop efforting, to stop striving, to stop trying to control. It’s to step into that place of Zero and just be, and allow all the abundance in the Universe to flow into our reality.

Abundance of course doesn’t just refer to financial abundance, but an abundance of all that which you’d like to experience.

I’ll be working on retheming and rebranding the website over the next week or so. The address will of course change, but you’ll be redirected there automatically so there shouldn’t be a problem.

The Dark Ascent Podcast is also coming down, because I don’t plan on continuing it, and it, too, expressed an energy that I no longer wish to identify with.

I hope you understand and enjoy this change, but this change was obvious to me and brings me joy, so by my new promise to myself, I must do it. 😀

My 7 Steps to Living at Zero

In my formulation of this new experiment, I have come up with 7 steps I am committing to, to enable me to live my life at Zero.

I think there are many others who would be interested in this. I thought about making it a blog series, but there’s quite a bit I have to say about it, and I think a live delivery would be more applicable.

So I’m putting together a masterclass for those who want to learn these 7 steps for themselves, and discover the power of returning to Zero.

It’ll be two separate calls, one week apart, each lasting 60-90 minutes. It’ll be held live on Zoom, but if you can’t catch it, obviously the recording will be available as well. I’m still finalizing the times I’ll hold the classes, but we’ll be starting sometime next weekend.

The cost to join me for this masterclass is just $49.97. You can join it instantly by clicking below:

Click Here to Sign Up Now

Your Thoughts

I hope you’ll join me on this journey to Zero. I really appreciate all those who have stuck around despite my inconsistent posting. I thought I was done with this site, but I think I have much more to share. I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments.