Being Mindful to live your best life
The key to living your best life can be summed up with one word, mindfulness. The practice of mindfulness is seen in everything we do on a daily basis. Whether it’s the food we eat, the exercises we perform, the jobs we work, the books we read, the entertainment we watch, the social media we consume, and the people we surround ourselves with, mindful awareness is the key to keeping a positive balance in our mind, body, and spirit.
In the past century or so we’ve experienced multiple revolutions. The industrial revolution, social revolution, and our current technological revolution have all changed our lifestyle and culture in countless ways. For many of us it’s nearly impossible to spend even a day without using products developed from these cultural revolutions. That being said, we are on the precipice of another revolution. The Mindfulness Revolution. This is a fusion of the biological, psychological, and the spiritual to transform our awareness in all three aspects of the human experience. Mind, body, and spirit.
Awareness is part of living your best life
Awareness of the incredible power of the mind, body, and spirit is growing. The trinity of mindfulness is not capable of being separated into factions. Rather, each category is meant to work congruently with the others. You cannot just focus on one of these aspects without the others because they are intrinsically woven together to create our human experience. The effects on the mind, body, and spirit through awareness is no longer considered “quasi-science”. Dr. Wayne Jonas M.D., a professor of Medicine at Georgetown University says, “Healing and wholeness can only occur when the mind, body, and spirit are in balance.” https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/how-healing-works/202004/how-balance-your-mind-body-and-soul-during-crisis
As the movement grows, there are more and more scientific studies coming out showing the importance of living a balanced and mindful life.
Being self-aware of what we do to our body is fairly obvious as our poor diet and sedentary lifestyle is usually shown by our fitness levels. Nevertheless, the effects of what we do to our mind and spirit can be difficult to conceptualize unless we do a deep dive into our lifestyle and cultural psyche. Let’s take a look.
Lately, we have experienced massive shifts of what would be deemed acceptable behavior in our culture. Especially those of you that lived through the 80’s, 90’s, and 2000’s like I have. The world is ramping up the evolution of our culture at breakneck speeds. Technology and social media have sped up this progression but we must ask, at what cost? Perhaps we trusted our own innovations more than we trusted the history of our own human experience.
What are you consuming?
I like to use the analogy of consuming processed junk food is equal to consuming processed junk information and experiences. I saw an excellent Joe Rogan podcast https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NpOxxzOhZyg the other day that confirmed what I had been thinking for several years now. As we now know, processed food typically has low or no nutritional value. Even products that claim to be “healthy” and “natural” are usually very far from it.
If we have a diet that consists of mostly processed “junk” food then we see the effects in our body by weight gain, diabetes, hypertension, heart disease, stroke, lethargy, poor sleep, body pain, depression, anxiety, poor life quality, and the list goes on and on. Now you know what that processed junk food does to your body and mind. What do you think consuming processed junk information and being consumed by negativity does to your mind and the damage it does to your spirit?
If we constantly surround ourselves with things that cause us anger, hate, fear, anxiety, etc., than it will inextricably effect our mind, body, and soul. These negative attributes physically cause our body and mind stress that over-stimulates our sympathetic nervous system (SNS fight or flight response) and inadvertently effects us both psychologically and physiologically. According to a South Korean study in 2016, the overstimulation of the sympathetic nervous system caused an increase in inflammatory cytokines that is also seen in Major Depressive Disorder (MDD). https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5050399/https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5050399/
Not only that, in a Healthline article in 2018, the authors outline the effects that chronic stress has on the rest of our body due to overstimulation in our SNS. They state there is an
increase in
- headaches
- heartburn
- rapid breathing
- high blood pressure
- fertility issues in women
- erectile dysfunction in men
- low sex drive
- body pain
- weakened immune system
- high blood sugar
- insomnia.
- https://www.healthline.com/health/stress/effects-on-body#8
Feed the Spirit to live your best life
So we can see a direct correlation between mind and body, but you may be asking, “What about the spirit?” It seems so esoteric, but the reality is the spirit is what keeps your mind and body together. Among many others, here are some things that positively effect the spirit:
- having purpose in your life
- exercising
- eating healthy
- sharing a meal with someone
- engaging with good friendships and relationships
- giving without expecting anything in return
- being honest with yourself and others
- learning something new
- forgiving others and forgiving yourself
- giving compliments
- paying it forward
Whether you come from a religious background or are agnostic/ atheist, I think we can all agree that we are put into this world to create rather than destroy. When you give without asking anything in return your spirit is empowered. Like everything else in life, there is a dichotomy that can either hurt or help your spirit.
Which Spirit do you feed?
If you are negative, angry, jealous, fearful, hateful, selfish, divisive, cruel, vain, hurtful, etc., then you will hurt your spirit. When you are positive, kind, loving, caring, compassionate, generous, humble, happy, etc., then you are helping your spirit. Over time your spirit will either be dimmed or brightened by your actions. These choices may seem trivial at the moment but the evolution of your life-path will either lead to more destructive/negative options in the future, or they will lead to more constructive/ positive options for your life.
So we’ve gone through some of the basics of mindfulness as well as the adaptations in lifestyle and culture that will help your life. We each have a choice every moment of every day. Somedays we’re just not feeling it and life can smack us in all sorts of jacked up ways that can really throw us off our game big time. It’s how we respond to those challenges that make the difference. Are we embodying a more positive or negative awareness in our life? Even when we inevitably mess up and handle something poorly, the point is to be mindful, correct what needs to be corrected, and most of all, learn.
We live our best life to change the world!
Hopefully you can see the correlations among all three attributes of the mind, body, spirit spectrum. Small choices on a daily basis lead up to massive changes in our life over time. That’s why mindful awareness is so important. Simple things such as eating an apple instead of a bag of chips. Sharing a kind word with someone. Staying off social media for a day. Going for a walk instead of sitting in front of the TV.
These things may seem trivial but they’re just small steps on your goal to live your best life humanly possible. I hope you’ll join me in this Mindfulness Revolution and spread the word. If you’d like help getting started on your journey or have questions about where to start you can email me by clicking the link below or follow the CONTACT button in the menu above. Thanks for reading and I look forward to working with you.
