You know those moments when you are faced with a choice between what feels good and what feels smart?

Choose good. I promise you will never regret it.

Let me explain.

You possess an unerring instinct for choosing what feels good. Heeding that instinct, you plunge happily into “the honey stream” – my name for that sweet flow of joy and ease that feels like home, like relief, and like a whole-hearted YES. Such a delicious place to be!

  • When you’re in the honey stream, you’re working with rather than against yourself.
  • When you’re in the honey stream, there may well be challenges, but somehow they feel like the “right” challenges for you.
  • When you’re in the honey stream, things click into place.
  • When you’re in the honey stream, you work, and the work feels like your work to do.
  • When you’re in the honey stream, you feel wonderful. You feel like yourself.

Every day, about matters both small and great, we can choose to live in the honey stream or to stay out of it by doing the “smart” thing. You really need a nap, but you should get these bills written. You yearn to live in the country but you fear it isn’t practical. You don’t like the way that person talked to you but it would be rude to leave the party. You feel like playing music but it would be smart to write those emails.

Any time you listen to the voice that says what you “should” do, you keep yourself out of the honey stream. You can recognize that voice because it badgers, prods, hectors, and threatens. It issues dire warnings. It resorts to sarcasm and abuse to get you back in line.

When you listen to the instinct that promises fun, ease, pleasure, flow, interest, aliveness, or deliciousness, you choose the honey stream. Your heart opens. Your eyes light up. You catch yourself smiling. Sometimes you even feel like laughing.

Wait just a cotton pickin’ minute there, Kate.

 Are you saying that I should never do anything I don’t want to do again? Are you saying that I should choose the honey stream all the time, or at least as often as I can?

Um, yes. That’s exactly what I’m saying.

Look, I don’t believe that what truly feels good is ever immoral or is ever really against our best interests. Some part of us fears that if we choose the honey stream, we’ll lie around all day eating chocolate and watching Netflix. And guess what? Sometimes, that is exactly what it means to be in the honey stream. But after a few hours, a stronger instinct kicks in: To really live. To do stuff, to grow, to try things, to spend our strength and genius on projects that matter to us. Only consumer culture mistakes really living for lying inert and stuffing our faces. Really living is far more exciting and satisfying than that.

I believe in Goodness, capital G, and I believe that the honey stream is in tune with that. Choosing to flow with the honey stream, you put yourself in touch with Goodness, and that means very good things for you, personally, and for the world around you. You show up as a happy, magnetic, whole-hearted person, and you are far more powerful and useful that way than when you show up as a depleted, resentful, hopeless person.

I see this again and again in my own life. Some instinct directs me to go to the piano rather than respond to emails, for example, and heeding it, I find myself creating a new song that brings pleasure or hope. Or I’m pulled to go for a walk rather than buckle down to some task I’ve set, and sure enough, a pivotal insight strikes about a mile in.

Even tough or tricky things are better when I put them in the honey stream. When I need to make a challenging phone call, I put it in the honey stream and wait; at some stage, a powerful instinct moves me to pick up the phone, and I always find that the words I need are close to hand and that the other person is receptive; our hearts are more likely to open to each other when I call from the honey stream. Same for tasks I dread: tax prep, for instance. If I put it in the honey stream, there will come – always and unfailingly – a nod that the time is ripe, and then I get right to it and find that it was easier than I’d imagined.

And on a much larger level, I chose the honey stream when I decided to go all in as a musician, poet, and creator. Yes, it is sometimes scary as hell, and I am learning so much day to day as it all unfolds, but the truth is, it’s deeply exciting and wildly satisfying. These are my lessons to learn, my challenges to face. It feels like permission to be my true self and to use everything I have in the service of everything I love. I catch myself laughing out loud sometimes! And when I’m not laughing, I’m offering up prayers of gratitude that I have this chance to be the person I’ve always yearned to be.

That’s the honey stream!

Living in the honey stream, we still do things that scare us, but we feel better doing them. We still work, but the work feels like work we actually want to do. We strive and challenge ourselves, we spend our strength, and we move forwards without any guarantees, but we are deeply satisfied. It feels like we’re playing the right game for us, rather than someone else’s game.  It’s the delicious balance of ease and challenge.  It’s the sweetness of life, available to us in every moment, no matter what anyone has ever told us.  It’s here, waiting for you right now.

Here’s my wish for you and for me, dear reader:

Let’s live our lives in the honey stream. Every day, in ways large and small. And let’s be wild, cool, free, powerful, and loving people who create a wild, cool, free, powerful, and loving world by living in the honey stream – and inviting everyone to join us there!