This is the only 2024 “forecast” you need.
This is what will be, and already is, the source of your greatest challenge this year. It is also the source of your greatest potential for transformation and empowerment.
Let’s cut to the chase:
You can choose to believe that life, at its Source, is benevolent and loving.
It is really that simple.
In a world screaming at you about disaster, malevolence, conspiracies, and war you can choose what you want to believe about life - life at its core. This has been the point of my work, my podcast, all of it, all along, but it is only now that I have become brave enough to speak into existence, and live it daily.
What you do not realize is that you hold beliefs about the source of reality that shape your entire experience of life.
These span a wide range, from what you believe about God, to the creation of the Universe and the laws of physics, to the way your mind works in relationship with reality. These are all the same thing, as you may already know. But what most fail to understand is that you get to choose what you believe because there is no completely objective truth to the nature of reality.
In the age of information, you can build a case for nature’s law, God’s truth, what this all is, that is extremely compelling in almost every and any direction.
Can’t you see this reflected to you in the starkly different parallel universes that each American political belief system exists within? If you take the time to sit with the beliefs, thoughts, and “facts” that swirl within each political ideology, to truly be immersed in it with an open awareness, you will see that there is truth there. There is truth in each view point, and the ultimate truth may be somewhere in between, perhaps even just beyond what we can see and express in this current moment of division.
This is merely an example of how multiple truths coexist and ultimately they are ours to choose to believe. By believing them, we breathe life into them, bringing them into existence through our own thoughts, words, and then actions.
This is the crux of it all - what you believe shapes the world you exist in. Right down to the very core, often unconscious, beliefs you hold about the nature of reality.
Have you ever asked yourself questions such as…
What is the nature of life? Where did we come from? Was life created with a benevolent, loving intention? Is God loving? Was, and is, the nature of creation’s intention neutral, or even malevolent? What is humanity’s purpose and what are we at our core? Are we hateful or loving? Are we here to build or destroy? What is evil, darkness, what are the distinctions between it, where does it all come from? Is life fundamentally tragic? Or fundamentally beautiful and ecstatic?
If you haven’t asked yourself these questions, start now. Your answers to them are shaping the way you live and how you experience life.
What I am saying is that not only is there no “right” answer, no objective truth that we know, but that we get to choose what we believe and that there is abundant evidence to then shape our reality around this truth.
Let me ask you…
What do you think your life would look like if you believed that humanity is an insignifiant speck in this wild universe? What would life look like if you believed God, the Divine, didn’t exist, didn’t care, or was at best neutral?
What do you think your life would look like if you believe that humanity is inherently flawed, destructive, and even hateful? That we are a scourge on this earth and danger to one another? That war is inevitable and in our nature? What would life look like if you believe that humanity and life was created out of malevolent intentions and purposes?
What do you think your life would look like if you believe that we as humans are inherently loving beings? What do you think your life would look like if you believed that life itself was a positive force, that the forces of creation, are benevolent? That God, the Divine is Life, and it is the source of all Love, that it exists within all things, including yourself - and that love is your true nature?
These are the paths that lie before you. Which one do you choose? You are choosing one already whether you like it or not.
I choose that life is God, that the Divine is the fundamental energy of creation found in every single cell, every atom, every quanta in this Universe. I choose to believe that this Universe was birthed out of benevolence, that humanity is at its core good, and that this goodness, this love, lives in each and every one of us.
I have decided, finally, to be ruthlessly devoted to believing in a loving narrative of reality, a loving reality of my true nature. I believe that I am love and you are love and life is love and God is love and life is God. I believe this even if no one else around me does, even in a sea of anger, worry, war, division, and apocalyptic messaging.
I believe it because my life depends on it. I believe it because it is the highest vibration available in the Universe. I believe it because I know it to be true in every single cell in my body. I believe it to be true because this is the world I want to see, the world I wish to create.
I believe it because I choose to be the love I wish to see in the world.
Here’s the catch, if there is one: choosing to believe in love goes against everything we are taught, everything we believe keeps us safe, right down to our ancient survival wiring.
Humans have what is called a negativity bias. If you give a human two thoughts, one negative and one positive, they are predisposed to focus on the negative. Why? This is what helped us to survive for hundreds of thousands, arguably millions of years. It is deep within our brain circuitry. I will give you one example: in decades of research on relationships, John Gottman identified that due to negativity bias, for every one negative interaction we have with a loved one, we need five positive interactions to counterbalance it. That is how powerful our instinct to focus on what is wrong can be.
Instinct is not destiny, thanks to neuroplasticity. In the same way that genetics do not predetermine our future - nothing does, this is a foundational law of reality (at least the one I choose and observe daily). Everything is co-creation, everything is malleable to change, and therefore we actively determine who we are and what our life experience is. We can rewire our brain to the positive, I have done it multiple times over the course of my life and never than so powerfully in the last few months and weeks.
Choosing to believe that life is loving does not negate the reality that adversity is part of this earthly existence.
Hardship is inevitable. In fact, a negative mindset where we view life as difficult and inherently bad is part of how we subconsciously try to protect ourselves. We project our worst case scenario in an attempt to avoid this outcome, looking for other pathways, attempting to inoculate our bodies to the sensation of the negative emotions we will face. It is a valiant attempt, ancient in its origins, and while at times it can help us to find a safe pathway forward, it fails in its core intent. Projecting out negative timelines does not keep us safe. It only focuses our energy on what we do not wish to experience, powerfully bringing towards us that which we do want.
You can choose to take the information available to you to construct a belief system about how adversity and hardship are out to hurt and harm you, or you can see them as part of a powerful process of positive change. Life on earth is one of contrast. The light becomes brighter in the darkness, joy more powerful after grief, there is simply something to this path we walk here that teaches us about life, and ourselves, through duality. What’s beautiful though is that we can experience this polarity without profound suffering by simply choosing to feel our emotions fully. When we are embodied, allowing the waves of feeling to ride through us daily, we gain access to these highs and lows, lights and darks, without having to experience the depths of misfortune.
There is ample, abundant evidence that suffering cultivates positive psychological growth.
In research this is called post-traumatic growth and what it describes is that there is a bell-shaped trajectory to suffering and meaning. Yes, the more you suffer, the more potential you have for intimacy with a deep sense of meaning and purpose. Suffering can bring us connection with others, improved physical health, faith in the divine, personal strength and resilience, and so much more. This has been shown in the most dire of circumstances, from war to torture, and it is also true in regards to every day stress and maladies.
This is the point I am making is that the evidence exists on both sides of every argument, the information is there for our shaping, and we get to build a world of good or of malevolence out of it.
You can take the last few years as a profound example of this. You were told, early in the pandemic, that this illness was deathly and all must be very afraid of it. You were told there was only one way to heal and solve it, with an experimental medicine given to all. You were told a narrative of fear, division, and malevolence. Now, we can unequivocally say that this illness was not the threat we were told it was, if a threat at all, the solution did not work and had negative effects for many, and that we could have chosen love all along. We could have chosen love all along. Think about the difference it would have made, if despite what was being screamed at you from every inch of society, what if you decided it was wrong? What if you choose love instead?
As above, so below, and this is where most go off course.
There is a duality to everything on earth, meaning there are two parts of how we cultivate a narrative of love to powerfully transform ourselves and our lives.
Let’s look within for a moment. What are the stories you are choosing to believe about you? Your nature? Your core reason for existing? What are you fundamentally made of? Who are you?
We all share the same core wound and it comes from the same place. We are disconnected from the Source, from Life, from God, from ourselves, and from each other - every single one of these is fundamentally the same. Because you are disconnected, you believe you are less than, less than the Source that you are, less than the Love that you are. You believe you are unloved, and therefore unworthy.
Many people focus on self-love, self-compassion, self-empowerment, and it works, up to a point.
But are you beginning to see how what you believe about yourself is inextricably linked to what you believe about life?
If you believe that humans are an insignificant accident of a haphazard process of evolution, then you will believe you are insignificant and accidental. If you believe that humans are bad, you will believe that you are bad. If you believe God is nothing, you will believe you are nothing. If you believe God is neutral, you will have neutral feelings about who you are and a neutral life.
Everything you believe about yourself is what you believe about life and what you believe about life is what you believe about yourself.
If you focus on wars in the world, you will experience conflict in your life.
Here’s the thing, war never created peace. Conflict never gave rise to healing. It must start and end with love. Love is the only pathway to the life you desire to live and experience, the life you’re here to have. This is what Jesus was saying and what millions have misunderstood, as yet another way to project division and judgment onto their fellow humans.
It’s only about love, love is the only way, but you must be ruthless with it. You cannot focus on loving yourself while also having a fear-based, or even neutral personal ideology about the nature of life, God, and reality.
You must believe it all to be love if you wish to experience the love that you are, wholly and completely, and project that love out onto others.
Have you ever read the Gospels?
This is what most miss about Jesus, what you can only get by reading his words fully and completely with an open mind. Jesus was RUTHLESS. He spends most of the gospels being irritated at the Disciples for continually getting it wrong and misunderstanding his message. (I can’t imagine how he feels about how the rest of human history has gone down in his name.)
Jesus taught forgiveness, non-judgment, compassion, as a hard and fast rule.
There are no excuses, no buts, ands, or ifs.
So no, you don’t get to say that people who don’t believe in Jesus as what you think he was go to “heaven” or “hell”, that they are “good” or “bad”, who or what is “evil”. You have missed Jesus' point entirely if you believe that God chose one ethnic group over another, or if you think that God would wipe us from the face of the earth in a flood or a forthcoming apocalypse. The Bible was written by humans, humans projecting their fear and negative beliefs about the nature of reality onto God, nature, and the future.
Love is the way, the truth, the life. Love is the alpha and the omega.
Jesus is God because Jesus lived Love more than most other examples of any humans in history - though there have been many, many others, most unnamed by history.
What if you get to choose to be one of them?
How do you want to create a better tomorrow? How do you want to influence the future, the world our children will exist in? It can all feel big and scary and overwhelming. It is natural to see how fighting the negativity might be the path forward, as it is what has been done for thousands of years. But there is another way, it has been taught by spiritual teachers in various ways, but none so powerfully Jesus in my opinion for one single reason: LOVE.
Ruthless, unabidding, fierce, passionate, single-minded love.
To play with Gandhi’s “be the change you wish to see in the world,” I’m reminding you that the pathway to that is to be the love you wish to see in the world.
Change will only get you so far. Love is what will remake you and give birth to the life you’ve always desired to experience. It is that simple. It is that challenging.
To change your thoughts, and your actions, you must start within your beliefs. You must stop searching for an objective truth, stop seeking to be right, and start realizing all of that is a desire rooted in your ego. When we go looking for “truth” we get tossed and turned by an endless ocean of information. The seekers path is one of constantly being buffeted around, without recognizing the power that you have, the ship you are steering. Don’t you see that every potential is out there, available to you, every form of reality is yours for the taking?
Life on earth is an opportunity to co-create the life you desire to experience by loving and embracing your unique essence, allowing it to guide you, while choosing to believe that life itself is loving - and it loves you completely.
The most radical thing you can do in 2024 is to devotedly love yourself and to hold a loving perspective on life and reality with a fierce fidelity.
Yes, we are experiencing massive shifts and changes to our society that never happened before.
T.S. Eliot prophesied, the world “ends” not with a bang, but with a whimper. I am flipping his statement on its head to say that we create a new paradigm through a quiet revolution of love, and apocalypse is not only not coming, it is not the answer.
We are living through the dissolution of ways of being and existing that have been driving the collective for thousands of years. What most people do not understand is that the last few decades after World War II have been the most epically prosperous in all of human history. Yes, much hardship endures, but there is less death, war, famine, poverty, illiteracy, (the list goes on) than there has ever been. That period of prosperity is whimpering though, as it was built on a faulty foundation - a foundation that believes that God, Life is one of war, punishment, division, and hatred.
In the dissolution there is immense potential to catalyze a new existence. The prosperity we have experienced the last few decades has handed to us an opportunity never known before by humanity. With our survival needs met so completely, for such a huge portion of the human population, we have the chance to give birth to a new way of thinking, living, and being.
A new paradigm can emerge that is based on why we are here in the first place - the love of creation.
Just as every ancient creation says, the world is birthed from chaos through a sound. That sound is frequency and vibration, that becomes formed into words, and those words become thoughts. This is the blueprint, the map for us to take, that we can rewrite the narrative that it all starts with the words we think, and speak. For me, to me, it all comes back to the ideological, unspoken concepts that precede those words, that the true frequency that gives birth to all things is our core beliefs.
Do you want to continue to believe in the world we have experienced? Do you want to believe in a new one entirely? What do you want the foundation of that world to be?
I want it to be love, but I also choose to believe it has been love all along. I believe that life itself is a creative force of a nature so pure, so beyond our comprehension, we can only call it God or the Divine. I believe this force has another name, another feeling, and that is Love. I believe that as we are it, it creates us, continually in each and every moment, we are Love.
I believe that the only pathway we need is to follow love. To cultivate an inner environment of love through replicating our core beliefs about love as our nature, and the nature of reality, through our thoughts and actions. Yes, this is based on frequency, to direct your awareness and attention on love, and only love.
You will not be perfect at it, but it gets easier in time, and as love returns to be the essential vibration of your natural way of being, you and your life will transform entirely.
It’s up to you and the choice you are making.
I wanted to add a little note here at the end to say, hello!
It has been a while. My personal transformation the last couple of months led me to focusing inward, which outwardly (naturally) became a pause in my work, the podcast, my sharing here and on Instagram. I am elated to begin sharing the immense clarity that has come into my awareness, much of which has been quietly simmering, there all along, woven if unspoken in my work these last few months. As I’ve said, we must be ruthless in our dedication to love, to alignment, and that means allowing “shoulds” and “typical” ways of being to fall away completely. I am emerging from the cocoon, very slowly, with wings still wet - but I love that this essay flowed through me today to share with you.
Honestly, there are no words to express the joy and excitement I feel to witness and feel how it all will magically, miraculously unfold moment to moment this year!
For my subscribers, keep reading!
You can all expect much more on the practice of being the love you wish to see in the world, and for now, I’m sharing with this core community some initial thoughts, practices, and tools I have been using recently…
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Kelly Ingraham to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.