People have different relationships with their spirituality and religion. For some people, they’re something that they do once in a while, in their free time, or whenever it’s necessary, and that’s okay. But ideally, you would want your spiritual life to completely overlay and share space with the rest of your life, but it can be hard to get there.
There are 4 main questions that I suggest you use to create more of a holistic lifestyle:
- How is what I’m doing now in line with my spiritual perspective?
- How do I feel mentally?
- How do I feel emotionally?
- How do I feel physically?
These four questions, naturally, address the four facets of our lives that we tend to maintain separately. Spirit, mental, emotional, and physical. Most of what you do is satisfying in one or two ways, but ideally, we would expand that to be satisfying in all four ways.
The way we do this is by checking in.
Currently, right now, in this very moment, I’m writing a blog post.
Since a big part of my spirituality is sharing of knowledge, writing this blog post is spiritually satisfying. I feel good about what I’m doing and how it fits in with my spiritual ideals.
Mentally, I feel a little bit disorganized, but I’m pleased with how I’m rearranging things in my head, so as I work my way through this post, it becomes more and more satisfying.
Emotionally, I’m content. I enjoy writing and sharing my experiences. I’m also feeling a little vulnerable about talking about my feelings on my blog, no matter how small a share it is. But that’s okay – the discomfort is acceptable because it’s an area I need to grow in.
Physically, my back hurts. I’m not sitting with proper posture in my chair and my shoulders ache because my keyboard is too far away – I forgot to bring it to the front of my desk. There, now I’ve moved my keyboard and fixed my posture and that feels better.
That’s what a check looks like. And wherever you find discomfort, you want to examine that feeling and decide if it needs to be changed or not. Even if it means going out of your way and being a pain in the patooty, bringing comfort into these areas is ideal, though you can see my reasoning above for staying in my emotional discomfort, but my physical discomfort was serving no purpose, so it had to go.
This is a simple process you can use throughout your day, whenever you start an activity, or when you’re in meditation or otherwise turned inwards, to help integrate your life into something that’s in better holistic harmony. Since issues in one area spread to the others, you can increase your overall happiness this way.
