HOW TO EMBRACE YOUR PASSION
Trusting Your Cellular Wisdom -- by Gary Null, PhD
“Energy is eternal delight.”
— William Blake
What Passion Actually Feels Like
We all want more passion. Passion makes us come alive. How often have we had an experience that gives us a tingling sensation when we remember it? Try to recall all the positive and passionate feelings you have had and see how you feel.
If you connect with something that is authentic for you, you will feel it. You will feel it in the chakras, the energy sites in your body. No matter how long ago it happened, you will still feel it.
Every day we try to recreate sensations that gave us special feelings. Recreating in a positive way is constructive. Recreating by sublimating through artificial stimulants can create pleasurable sensations, but they have negative consequences.
This distinction has never been more important than it is right now, because we are living in an era of manufactured passion. The dopamine economy — the system of apps, platforms, and devices engineered to trigger short bursts of neurochemical reward — has created a civilization of people who are constantly stimulated but rarely moved. A notification gives you a hit. A like gives you a hit. A new episode, a new scroll, a new outrage, a new purchase — all hits. But a hit is not passion. A hit is a transaction. Passion is a state of being. The hit fades in seconds and leaves you reaching for the next one. Passion sustains you. It builds. It deepens. It transforms. And it cannot be delivered by an algorithm, because algorithms are designed to keep you consuming, and passion is designed to keep you creating.
The philosopher Baruch Spinoza described what he called conatus — the innate drive of every living thing to persist in its own being, to grow toward its fullest expression. Conatus is not desire for pleasure. It is the life force itself, pushing outward, seeking expression, demanding to be used. When you feel passion — genuine passion, the kind that makes you forget to eat, that wakes you before the alarm, that makes three hours feel like twenty minutes — you are experiencing conatus. You are experiencing the fundamental force of life moving through you without obstruction. And the question this essay asks is: What is obstructing it? And how do you remove the obstruction?
“My mission in life is not merely to survive, but to thrive; and to do so with some passion, some compassion, some humor, and some style.”
— Maya Angelou
Return to Your Body’s Inner Wisdom
Every one of the thirty-seven trillion cells in your body has a consciousness. If they did not, they would not know what to do. You do not tell your stomach how to digest food. You do not tell your lungs to breathe, or your eyes to blink to create tears so your eyes will not be irritated. You do not instruct your veins to carry blood to the heart at a certain rate or your arteries to carry the blood away. You do not tell your cells to take in oxygen and give off carbon dioxide. You do not tell your intestines to engage in peristalsis, that wavelike rhythmic movement that moves your food through your body and moves the dead cells, bacteria, and undigested cellulose and fibers out.
How do thirty seven trillion cells always work in perfect harmony and always for your betterment? They have consciousness, one that preceded life.
Your mother did not teach your heart how to beat or your brain to think. You were born with this innate knowledge, which is joined with conditioned responses and conditioned wisdom.
Modern science has begun to confirm this at levels that would have astonished previous generations. The field of interoception — the study of how the body senses its own internal state — has demonstrated that the body possesses an intelligence that operates independently of conscious thought. Your gut contains over five hundred million neurons — more than the spinal cord — and produces more than ninety percent of the body’s serotonin. Scientists now routinely refer to the enteric nervous system as the second brain. It communicates with the brain via the vagus nerve, but it also makes decisions on its own. Your gut feeling is not a metaphor. It is a literal, measurable, neurological event. When you feel something in your stomach before your mind has caught up — a foreboding, an excitement, a recognition that something is wrong or profoundly right — that is your body’s intelligence speaking in a language older than words.
We are born with perfect energy and complete harmony. We enter a world that challenges us physically, sometimes with environmental obstacles like pollutants that can overstimulate and disrupt neurons. We might eat foods we are allergic to that cause yeast overgrowth, urinary problems, or ear infections. Against all of these threats, your body does something unique — it tries to protect you. It is always working on your behalf. It tries to maximize its capacity to repair the damage.
What belief system honors the body completely? What belief system says that the body and mind and spirit are intimately connected and therefore there is only one consciousness? If we understand and honor that consciousness, then we have created harmony with this life.
The ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle called this harmony eudaimonia — human flourishing. He argued that every living thing has a telos, a purpose built into its nature: the acorn’s telos is to become an oak, the eye’s telos is to see, and the human being’s telos is to live fully, virtuously, and with the full expression of their capacities. Passion, in Aristotle’s framework, is not a luxury. It is the felt experience of living in alignment with your telos. When you feel passion, your body is telling you: this is what you were made for. When you feel numb, your body is telling you: you have drifted from your purpose. Listen to the body. It knows things the mind has forgotten.
“Happiness is the meaning and the purpose of life, the whole aim and end of human existence.”
— Aristotle
Re-Creating the Positive in Your Life
We need to recapture our passion to explore, to experience, and to allow the wonder of life that lets us wake up each day and say: What can I experience today that is new and original? If you do not give yourself new experiences, then all your tomorrows will be endless repeats of today, including your pain, your insecurity, and your judgments.
Every single day we have to re-create our life. To do that, we have to realize that when we wake up in the morning, we are not the same person who lay down to sleep. Our cells have changed. Our biochemistry has changed. Usually, we only see change as quantum effects. We realize that we have gone from forty years old to fifty, but we did not pay attention while it was happening.
The only thing we have in life is the moment we are in. We try to build lasting relationships, lasting careers, and security for our future. But the moment is all there is. When we do something meaningful with the present moment, then the next moment is probably going to be even better. If I decide to make positive choices right now, then tomorrow’s choices will not be burdened by previous wrong choices. If I exercise today, my body will show it tomorrow. If I eat right today, my body will feel it tomorrow. If I think right today, my body and my brain will experience it tomorrow.
But it takes courage to stand up and say: No, I do not want negative energy within me, and I have a right to reject it. How much junk conversation and junk emotion have you taken in? You cannot live off junk food. You become obese and sick. Junk relationships will sicken you too. Remember, you have the right to reject any energy that does not honor you spiritually, emotionally, mentally, physically, and creatively.
In the age of infinite content, this right to reject has become both more essential and more difficult to exercise. Every platform you engage with is designed to override your capacity to say no. Autoplay prevents the pause in which you might choose to stop watching. Infinite scroll eliminates the natural stopping point that a finite page once provided. Push notifications interrupt your chosen activity with someone else’s priority. The entire architecture of digital life is designed to prevent the very thing that passion requires: the deliberate, conscious choice of where to direct your energy.
The philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche wrote about what he called self-overcoming — the process by which a human being transcends their inherited conditioning and becomes the author of their own values. Nietzsche understood that this is not a gentle process. It requires the courage to reject what the culture offers and to create something of your own. It requires the willingness to be misunderstood, to be out of step, to stand alone. And it requires passion — not the manufactured passion of the dopamine hit, but the sustaining fire of a person who has found their purpose and refuses to be distracted from it.
“He who has a why to live can bear almost any how.”
— Friedrich Nietzsche
Mastering and Actualizing Your Own Energy
We have diminished the capacity to master our energy — and without mastery, we do not progress. Mastery requires the confidence to exist in the moment. It requires discipline, and the fuel that drives mastery is passion. If you are willing to combine your passion with discipline, then one day you will wake up and find you have begun to master your own energy. Your openness increases and your whole life changes for the better.
But if you do not take that inner journey of focusing on the essential through discipline and self-actualization, you will not master yourself and you will not see any sustainable positive changes. We are exhausting the basic energy of our chi, which needs to be rejuvenated constantly. The chi, your central life force, can only be rejuvenated by quiet, reflective, contemplative stillness. If you are alone in nature, you are rejuvenating. If you are running around all the time, even to get your yoga and your meditation and your glass of wheatgrass juice, you end up exhausted.
The irony of our current moment is that we have more tools for wellness than any civilization in history and less actual wellness. We have meditation apps, breathwork courses, yoga streaming platforms, biohacking protocols, sleep trackers, heart rate variability monitors — an entire industry of optimization. And yet rates of anxiety, depression, burnout, and chronic disease continue to climb. Because the tools are not the practice. The app is not the stillness. The tracker is not the sleep. You can quantify every metric of your health without ever once being present to the experience of being alive. The data becomes another form of busyness, another layer between you and the direct, unmediated experience of your own body and your own moment.
We need to be much more focused on how we use and direct our energies.
We wait for something to happen that will ignite our interest and inspire us to action. We want to be saved. We want to be rescued. No one is going to come and save you. You have to become highly proactive. It is your life, and you are the only one who is responsible for it. You are the only one who can self-actualize.
The psychologist Abraham Maslow, who coined the term self-actualization, found that the people who fully realized their potential shared a cluster of characteristics: they were comfortable with reality, they had a deep acceptance of themselves and others, they were spontaneous and creative, and they had what he called peak experiences — moments of profound joy and connection that arise not from external achievement but from the simple, overwhelming experience of being fully present. Peak experiences are passion made visible. They are what happens when the chi is flowing, the moment is alive, and the person has stopped performing long enough to feel it.
Defining Your Own Reality: The Race
How often have people told you that you cannot, or should not, do something because they would not do it? Try to believe in the best you can be, in your greatest moments and in your happiest and healthiest self. Every truth starts with belief. Self-actualization by positive thought, with the right discipline, will allow the belief to manifest.
Let me tell you a story, because it illustrates everything in this essay.
I have run more than six hundred races. Before a race, I run the race in my mind, so my creation becomes my reality. I focus and honor that reality. Once I was racing in the 40K National Championship Race in New Jersey with about 155 other champion athletes, the best in America in my age group. At about six miles into the race, my buddy says: Wow. It is a hot day. This is going to be tough.
Instantly I felt my energy drain out. My fatigue had started in my brain, not in my muscles.
So I said to myself: No. This is a chance to challenge a belief. It is a great day and the sun is energizing me. I want it to get hotter. The hotter it gets, the more power I am going to have. So I kicked in and left my buddy in the dust. People shouted out to me: Gary, you are going too fast, you will burn out! But I said to myself: No. I am going to burn up the track. I am not going to burn out.
I got faster and faster. When we came to a hill, I said: Hill, you are my friend. The hill energized me, and I raced right up it. At about the eighteenth mile, I passed the national champions in the lead and came in two minutes ahead of the second-place runner. I set a new master record.
How was this possible? Because I believed it was possible. Had I not believed it, I could not have created it. Whatever you believe, you can also create if you have the discipline to master it.
The neuroscience of this is now well-documented. Researchers have shown that self-talk — the internal narrative you maintain during challenging situations — directly affects physiological performance. Positive self-talk reduces perceived exertion, lowers cortisol, and extends time to exhaustion. Negative self-talk does the opposite. When my buddy said it was going to be tough, he was not describing the weather. He was programming his nervous system for failure. And when I overrode that program with a different narrative, I was not engaging in delusion. I was exercising the most powerful tool a human being possesses: the capacity to choose the meaning of the moment I am in.
Viktor Frankl called this the last of human freedoms — the freedom to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances. The hill was the same hill for every runner. The sun was the same sun. The distance was the same distance. What was different was the story I told myself about them. And the story determined the outcome. Not because the universe was responding to my vibrations. Because my nervous system was responding to my choices. And the nervous system controls everything.
“Whether you think you can or think you can’t, you’re right.”
— Henry Ford
We Need to Accept Ourselves Completely
Do you constantly seek success in the hope that recognition will overcome your insecurity, doubts, and fears? If so, then you will try to control everything that people think about you, through your actions and your words. You are not living an honest, authentic life. You are creating an image of yourself.
If we hand over the responsibility for our happiness to someone else, then we are in a false relationship that will never work no matter how hard we try. It can be scary to think that we are so powerful that we can be complete within ourselves. We are led to believe that we are nobody unless we have somebody else, or the right clothes, or the right job, or the right friends.
Social media has industrialized this dependency on external validation. Every post is a request for approval. Every like is a micro-dose of borrowed self-worth. Every comparison to another person’s curated highlight reel is an act of self-abandonment. A study in 2025 found that the average person spends over forty minutes a day managing their online identity — selecting images, crafting captions, monitoring responses. That is forty minutes a day spent asking strangers for permission to feel good about yourself. Over a year, that is more than ten full waking days dedicated not to living your life but to auditioning it for an audience that is doing the same thing.
The philosopher Søren Kierkegaard saw this dynamic with devastating precision a century and a half before Instagram existed. He described what he called the despair of not being oneself — the condition of organizing your entire existence around other people’s expectations, other people’s approval, other people’s definition of who you should be. And he identified it as the most common and most dangerous form of human suffering, because the person experiencing it does not even know they are in despair. They think they are succeeding. They think the next promotion, the next relationship, the next milestone will finally fill the void. It never does. Because the void is not caused by insufficient achievement. It is caused by insufficient self-knowledge.
But if you are fully present and you are honest, you can look for the authentic qualities in your surroundings, and you can feel complete in the moment no matter what. We constantly strive for external acceptance, when the only acceptance that is important is internal. We need to love ourselves completely and unconditionally. Then what can shake you? Your spiritual and emotional roots will go so deep that in any crisis you will just smile and say: The universe is giving me another lesson to learn from. I will be better, stronger, and wiser because of this. This is all possible once you believe in the completeness of your being.
“The most terrifying thing is to accept oneself completely.”
Passion in the Age of the Machine
I want to close with a reflection on the particular challenge of passion in our current moment, because it is unlike anything previous generations have faced.
We are entering an era in which artificial intelligence can compose music, write poetry, generate art, produce film scripts, and simulate conversation with an eeriness that blurs the line between the human and the synthetic. And the temptation — the enormous, seductive, economically rational temptation — is to let the machine do the creating while we do the consuming. To let the algorithm generate the content while we scroll through it. To let the AI write the song while we listen passively.
But passion is not a spectator sport. It is participatory. It requires the investment of your own energy, your own attention, your own vulnerability. The machine can produce a technically proficient painting, but it cannot feel the tremor in its hand as it applies the first brushstroke. It can generate a grammatically perfect love letter, but it has never stood trembling at a doorstep wondering whether the person on the other side will open it. The product may be indistinguishable. The experience is not. And the experience is where passion lives.
If we surrender our creative faculties to machines — if we stop writing, stop painting, stop cooking, stop building, stop singing, stop dancing, stop making the beautiful, imperfect, deeply human things that no algorithm can truly understand — we will save time. But we will lose something that time cannot measure: the experience of being fully alive, fully engaged, fully burning with the energy that William Blake called eternal delight.
The poet Khalil Gibran wrote: Work is love made visible. He was not talking about productivity. He was talking about the sacred act of pouring yourself into something that matters to you, of giving physical form to what was previously only feeling. That is passion. That is the act that makes a life worth living. And no technology, however sophisticated, can perform it for you, because the act itself — not the product of the act — is the point.
So embrace your passion. Not the curated, hashtagged, algorithmically optimized version of it. The real thing. The messy, inconvenient, time-consuming, occasionally embarrassing, deeply human thing. The thing that makes you forget to check your phone. The thing that makes three hours feel like twenty minutes. The thing that, when you are doing it, makes you feel — for reasons you may never be able to articulate — that you are exactly where you are supposed to be.
That feeling is not an illusion. It is the truest thing about you. Honor it. Protect it. Feed it. And never, under any circumstances, hand it to a machine.