Essentially, the difference with New Energy is that our ‘higher self’ (or insert your favourite term) is here too, in our conscious awareness. The task is to bring the human self and the higher self into alignment which is like living in flow, living without inner conflict and, a big one for me, knowing why.

How do you know what your higher self wants?

By noticing what you want. Your higher self makes its opinions known through your desires, through what you feel like doing. You’d think this would be easy, you’d think we would have been following the promptings of our higher selves all along – and in a way we have – but look at how the Old Energy world was set up. We were filled with fear, with religious obligations, piety and such, even celibacy, prone to making vows and commitments, walking a path of hard slog for long-term gain, making something of ourselves. There was not much room for noticing what we wanted to do now and freely pursuing that.

I had a conversation today about justifying being ’slack’. I have a friend who’s daughter will start school soon so she will have more time available. ‘But I still just want to work three days a week,’ she said, ‘I want to have a bit of time for doing whatever I want.’ And then she and everyone else launched into a list of justifications for doing what she wanted to make it sound morally supportable.

‘How about: You want to and you can?’ said I. Nobody really heard me. We have a very tenacious attachment of guilt to doing what we want. We still have a very strong work ethic, and ‘work’ in said ethic has to be a bit of a chore. If it’s something we enjoy it’s not considered work and not considered morally valuable.

If you want to become more aligned with your flow, practise these expressions and feel how they roll off the tongue:

Because I want to.  and

Because I don’t want to.

It’s most important not to overlook the full stop. It’s not about, ‘I don’t want to because of some external factor that makes it appropriate that I don’t do it,’ it starts and finishes with identifying what you feel like doing. If you get the hang of it you won’t have to come up with so many lies:

I’m busy that night.

 I’m feeling sick.

 My grandmother died. 

 My cat ate it.

Been there. Don’t go there any more. My daughters and I have been following the feel-like-it principle for many years and now know how it goes to say no to each other. When a proposal arises, we each look inside ourselves and respond with either,

‘I don’t seem to feel like doing that.’ or

 ‘Yes, that seems to appeal to me.’

. . . following our noses along the path of least resistance, the flow of our personal, unified intents.