The holistic view of the modern human being is reflected in many areas of life today. In the current fields of medicine, psychology, sociology and even religions, each has begun to adopt a more holistic view to meet the needs of this ever changing world. This is how powerful the holistic view impacts the world we live in, it is the methodology behind all progressive thinking, be it physical, mental or spiritual based.
Everything about life can be related to the holistic point of view. When we encourage all individuals to start using holistic methods in their daily life, we also help set an example that is important for all human beings to follow. Our world is experiencing many new energetic changes in this new age of history, but everyone is an individual with their own particular lessons and unique part to play in these changing times. So they need to be encouraged to become a holistic individual by raising their universal consciousness each day.
How Important Is A Holistic Lifestyle?
In simplest terms, everyone should be encouraged to empower their bodies, expand their minds and seek enlightenment spiritually. The average person lives a life that is rarely challenged to do these things, yet all people want to become a fully realized human being. Once they are encouraged to do so, they immediately get excited and filled with energy. This is because, all human beings wish to reach their fullest potential. All human beings wish to live an authentic life and become one with their universal consciousness. It is natural for all people to do this, but each person must begin by taking steps to improve the body, mind and spirit.
The following 3 sections of this article are broken down into lists of ways to encourage individuals to live a more holistic lifestyle, one that can be practiced in their daily routines. The 3 lists are the empowerment of the body, the expansion of the mind and the enlightenment of the spirit, in that order. The individual can practice some or all of these suggestions and begin living a more holistic lifestyle.
Empowerment of the Body
1. Getting Enough Exercise
Most people need to start with the basics, like getting themselves more active and physically fit. This means getting enough exercise, so that they can begin dealing with other issues related to their physical health. Nothing is more important for an individual and their body. Getting proper exercise increases the lifespan, increases energy levels, but mainly makes you feel better. Start within reasonable limits, the body needs to build up to a daily workout regiment. A few times a week for brief periods is a good start, but a body must be exercised, if it is going to perform well.
Empowerment of the body must include exercising it.
2. Keeping Regular Sleep Patterns
A regular sleep pattern is very important aspect of being physically fit. Our resting is as important to the body, as our daily activity is. Keeping within a regular and timely sleep pattern is necessary, both for our physical and mental activities each day. Not getting enough sleep will diminish the overall productivity of an individual, but also causes them to use their physical energy much more rapidly. To keep the body in tune and running at peak performance levels, a daily regiment of sleep is absolutely key.
3. Learning to Breathe Correctly
Breathing is the key to connecting with the body. We function everyday, because our body uses breathing to keep our physical self in sync. Learning to breathe correctly is important, since we control most of our daily reactions to the world via how we inhale and exhale. In simplest terms, we should learn to slow ourselves down by taking deep breaths, especially when we are under stress. Daily activities that tax our energy can be controlled, if we simply monitor our breathing and slow ourselves down, rather than reacting to them.
4. Eating Organic Foods
Most foods are filled with toxins and chemicals that alter our bodies in dramatic ways. By eating organic foods, we eliminate many of these toxic substances and increase the nutritional value of what we put into our bodies. Eating organic foods is also good for the environment, so it aids in our connection with the Earth itself. This is a good first step towards eating a more healthy diet and living a holistic lifestyle. Your diet is a huge factor when trying to empower the physical body.
5. Drinking Clean Water
Getting plenty of clean fresh water is essential for the daily health of the body. Drinking lots of clean water is not only healthy, but hydration is essential for all aspects of the physical body. If bottled water is not your cup of tea, so to speak, then consider installing a water filtration kit or purchasing a refrigeration system that has one built in. These are cost effective, but provide all the clean drinking water that an individual need to keep their body healthy and happily hydrated.
6. Consider a Vegan Lifestyle
When making changes to a more holistic lifestyle, why not consider going vegan or at least try a vegetarian diet? Once your body starts getting adjusted to living a healthier lifestyle, it can only benefit from taking it to the next level. Don’t rush into anything, because all permanent change is proceeded by formative steps and a well planned behavioral shift. This is just a suggestion to be considered, because choosing a vegan or vegetarian diet will help purify the body, it will also improve your overall physical health.
7. Quit Smoking
Smoking cigarettes and tobacco is deadly to the physical body. Nothing is more toxic, nor is any other addiction harder to break than smoking. Empowerment of the body means addressing all negative habits that are causing harm to yourself physically. Addiction in all forms qualifies, so it must be stopped, if your physical health is to benefit from any holistic lifestyle changes.
8. Quit Drinking Alcohol
The effects of alcohol impact the body, but also the lives of everyone around the person who is drinking it. Quitting alcohol consumption will expand your life and improve your quality of living. Next to smoking, alcoholism is as deadly and dangerous to your physical health, but more so to your personal life. This is another addictive habit that must be addressed, if the changes in your lifestyle are going to benefit you significantly.
9. Quit Using Legal and Illegal Drugs
Use of drugs is a major problem worldwide. Both legal and illegal substances are to blame for all things negative, including loss of life, criminal activities and violent behavior in general. Drug use of any kind is about addictive behavior, not all drugs are physically addictive, but their impact is just as hard to control. The only way to truly control addictive behaviors is not engaging in them. Quitting drug use impacts the body in numerous positive ways, but most importantly it can save your life as an individual.
10. Practice the Art of Yoga
To make the most of your holistic lifestyle changes, a wonderful way to replace old activities and habits is practicing yoga. Yoga is a form of physical exercise, a martial art and an active form of moving meditation. Yoga is one of the best ways to get in touch with the body, mind and spirit. By practicing the art of yoga, the individual will learn to empower themselves while releasing all negative energies trapped in their body. Yoga can be practiced daily in the privacy of your own home, so it allows an individual to focus on themselves and become more focused.
Yoga aids self empowerment, but also feels good and increases energy flow within the body.
Expansion of the Mind
1. Learn to Relax
Relaxation is the art of calming the mind, so that it can interact with the physical and spiritual self more effectively. Nearly all actions involved with expansion of the mind, begin with learning to be in a relaxed state. Mental relaxation is integrally related to controlling physical body functions. It is also interrelated to most non-physical states of consciousness, such as out of body experience, lucid dreaming and astral projection. Learning to relax the mind is by definition, expanded mental awareness and an altered state of consciousness.
2. Learn to Be Still
Just sitting still is difficult for many individuals. It is a necessary component, if an individual that wants to expand their mental powers. Stillness is the parallel component to being relaxed. Once the mind is relaxed, it can then allow the physical and mental aspects of a person to remain still. The term still meaning without movement or being undisturbed by external surroundings. In this state, the mind and body are able to interact with harmonious unity. This is essential for the mind to perform physical and psychological healing for the individual. Stillness can be likened to a calm watery surface, when undisturbed. The undisturbed mind, like the calm water is reflective and capable of expanding infinitely.
3. Learn to Enjoy Silence
Relaxation and stillness are wonderful, but do an individual little good, if they are unable to be silent. Learning to be silent, then enjoy the gift of silence this is a key to mastering the mind. It is within pure silence that our mind is able to let go consciously, thus allowing full access to deeper subconscious realms of our brain. Our mind has many regions that lay untapped, but within them are dormant and powerful human capabilities that can be unlocked. Most of these require that an individual be able to maintain a calm, clear mental state, one that is free from all activity. Learning to achieve a state of mental silence is the best way to open oneself to these long dormant brain centers.
4. Learn to Let Go of Stress
Stress is the number one cause of human depression, anxiety and self destructive behaviors. In the modern world, our daily stress is a powerful force that must be understood, so we can let go of it and the power it has over us. If our minds were free of our daily stress, many ordinary activities would be much easier to do. Let alone, without the enormous stress levels most people exhibit everyday, the productivity of the average person would be greatly increased. We can all learn to let go of stress by using techniques such as breathing, meditation, exercise and yoga. As we learn healthy ways to reduce and deal with our daily stress, we can also reap the benefits of having a clearer mental state. Letting go of stress is an incredible relief for most people, as it is a major way of expanding their mind and allowing them to use their brain more freely.
5. Get Outdoors More Often
Getting out in nature is a blessed thing, because it is where we reconnect with the real world. All our human activities revolve around things we do inside buildings, cars and other indoor places, but in the outdoors, we are actually free to roam. This is good for our bodies, but is particularly healthy for our mental fatigue and daily anxiety. Getting outdoors more often has an additional benefit for the expansion of the mind. It literally gets us to think outside of our self made boxes, or the confined spaces that we live, work and interact within everyday. In nature, none of those rules that our ordinary world relies on still apply. We can think outside the confines of man-made and unnatural barriers, so that our mind is free to flow. Thus getting outdoors is mind expanding by virtue of being in the wide open spaces, like nature intended.
6. Take Time to Reflect Everyday
It is healthy to reflect on our daily lives. Doing so everyday is even more healthy, so that we can let our minds download and delete unnecessary data, much like our computers need to do. When we take time to reflect, we help our minds process our daily activities and put experiences into a proper perspective. This helps us to remember things more clearly and expands our mental lives by doing so.
7. Take Time to Ground Yourself
Our bodies hold in many energies from our daily life, but it is our minds that keep them buried in ourselves. We need to take time to ground ourselves on a daily basis. This can be done by sitting beside a tree or in the grass and visualizing that we have roots, letting these extend deep in the Earth. Let your mind release all the daily stress and negative energies within you, then ground them into the Earth itself. The ground is their natural resting place and the Earth knows what to do with them, so trust in this wisdom. Your mind allows you to release all the energies within the body, so that it can feel freedom. Taking time to ground yourself is very healthy for the body and mind.
8. Take Time to Read a Book
A vital part of expanding the mind is keeping it active, this means continuing to learn new things. Reading is one of the best ways of keeping the mind active, but also allows an individual to keep educating themselves throughout life. Keeping the mind active throughout the aging process is like exercise, the brain is a muscle that needs regular workouts to stay sharp. This is simply good common sense, not brain surgery. Taking time to read is a powerful tool and an excellent daily activity.
9. Keep a Daily Journal
Some thoughts pass us by in daily life, so many wise persons have learned that keeping a journal helps catch these momentary glimpses into our personal world. The value of an individual journal becomes more clear over time, because it allows for personal reflection and remembering some of our most private experiences. Many things we would normally forget are saved by keeping a daily journal. Another version of this is keeping a dream journal, one that we write in at night as we awaken from sleeping. This type journal allows us to record things from our unconscious life, just as a daily journal records events from our awakened life. Both are very powerful tools for expansion of mental clarity and understanding the mind.
10. Practice the Art of Meditation
There is nothing more powerful for expanding the mind, than the practice of meditation. Practicing the art of meditation is a tool for learning how to use their mind more effectively, but also helps to clear unhealthy thought patterns and expand personal awareness in everyday life. Meditation can be used to heal the body and connect to our spiritual nature, but is also the key to finding peaceful inner tranquility on a daily basis. Learning to meditate is both simple and complex, so start with trying to breathe and clear your thoughts. This can be done anywhere, just take a few minutes and take a break from the daily world.
Meditation is the key to expansion of the mind, so make it a part of your daily holistic lifestyle.
Enlightenment of the Spirit
1. Be Grateful for Life Itself
Being grateful is a first step towards enlightened thinking. Life is the most important thing to be grateful for, as it facilitates all things we experience spiritually. Stop to think about all the good things you have in your life. Take time to think of all the good thinks that have happened to you. Consider all the good things that life has brought into your world. Even now, imagine all that is going g00d for you and be appreciative of it. Be grateful for all these things and all the things that haven’t come to pass. Be grateful for life itself, it truly is a wonderful gift and opens doors to enlightenment of the spirit.
2. Give Thanks to the Universe
We should all learn to give thanks to the universe, on a daily basis. This is understood in the our rituals of giving thanks at meals in all cultures. Giving thanks is a powerful gesture, one that you can use to expand your happiness, improve your health and open your heart to greater things. All spiritual knowledge begins with being thankful for it, being humbled by it and receiving it, as you become ready for a more enlightened spiritual life.
3. Give Time to Others Around You
Giving of yourself is the greatest gift, so learning to take time to the people we encounter in daily living is very important. Whenever you think about other people in the world, give a moment of pause and send them your prayers, but better yet go and help them directly. Giving your time to help others is a worthwhile way of paying it forward in a karmic sense, over a lifetime this action will become a healthy habit and bring positive energies into your spiritual life.
4. Spend More Time With Loved Ones
Making time for our personal relationships is a valuable thing. Our family and close friends are our direct connections to the spiritual human species, they are our tribal family. In our busy hectic lives, we need to make time for the people who matter to us most. Sometimes we neglect to do so, leaving ourselves spiritually bankrupt and disconnected from the very individuals that are linked so closely to our spiritual path. When we spend time with our loved ones, it reminds us of our lifelong journey and all the work that we have done to get this far. Our achievements will be evident in those who know us well, so will our lack of enlightened thinking throughout the years. All that we are is intertwined within the history of those we are related to, bonded with and that we have chosen to make part of our nuclear family. So they are equally able to enlighten us, when it comes to understanding our spiritual learning and where we are going in this lifetime.
5. Find Time to Do Nothing
This maybe a new concept to many reading this article, but finding time to do nothing is a very spiritual activity. Do you do things in your life because you want to, or because you believe that you need them? Do you want things in this life because you need them, or because you have been told that you should have them? Do you feel the need to do things, just to avoid the feeling that you are doing nothing? These are questions that have nothing to do with spiritual thinking. They are questions based on the confusion of our Earthly material reality. Are you paying attention to the signs the universe is sending you and the guidance you feel deep in your soul? Because we’re so full of ideas and judgments that most of us are in a state of confusion. We question ourselves about what we should and shouldn’t do, yet we tend to ignore the best advice that comes from the guidance from our soul. Learning to do nothing, even for a minute at a time, allows us to get in touch with our higher consciousness. It is the enlightened version of being clam and relaxed, but taken to the next level. Learning to do nothing can be a powerful tool and allow our spiritual guidance to come from within us.
6. Enjoy the Gift of Laughter
Learning to laugh is another spiritual activity that often gets neglected. Enjoying the gift of being able to laugh at life is significant, because it requires a higher level of enlightened consciousness to be able to do. Being able to laugh in the face of negativity, allows us to face our fears, but not be crippled by them. Being able to laugh at ourselves, allows us to be humble, but not get angry when others laugh at us. We learn to see the oddity of life from both sides, being able to get the joke and tell the joke. We can see ourselves as human, but also laugh when others see it. Enjoy the gift of laughter, no matter which side of the coin you are on. Eventually, the tables will turn so that another person stands in your place. This is a powerful lesson for those who claim to be enlightened.
7. Smile More Often
Most of us don’t smile nearly enough. This doesn’t mean faking a smile or smiling when we feel it is expected of us, but smiling because we feel and want to share happiness with other people. A smile is a silent gesture, it requires almost no physical energy, it takes almost no mental power, yet it yields a great amount of spiritual connection to those it is shared with. So smile more often. It maybe the easiest step towards a more enlightened spiritual consciousness.
8. Listen to Your Inner Voice
Taking time to listen to ourselves is a precious thing, one that should be done everyday or more often. That inner voice we all have is a special device, our personalized direct link to our higher self and allows us to answer many questions. Our inner voice is our spiritual self, but it requires that we be silent in order to hear it clearly. Learning to listen to your inner voice takes practice, but the benefits are worthwhile. Nothing else allows for any closer connection to your higher self.
9. Learn to Balance Your Chakras
If you practice yoga and meditation, the next step is learning to balance your body and mind. As you do this, there is a system of energy centers that connect both the body and mind to energies that link them to the universal spiritual self. These energy centers are called the chakras and they exist within every human being, allowing them to balance their body, mind and spirit. There are 7 chakras corresponding to the colors of the rainbow, so anyone can learn to visualize them to be used for energetic balancing of the holistic human body, mind and spirit collectively. Learning to do this is a key to mastering the higher consciousness and achieving more enlightened states.
10. Practice Random Acts of Kindness
The enlightened soul understands the power of kindness in their everyday life. Daily living offers many opportunities to practice random acts of kindness, just go outside and watch for others in need. The smallest act can change the daily perspective of an individual. Helping someone change a tire or carry out their trash, these minor actions can shape the way another person sees the world. A single kind action lends itself to changing perspectives, so that person you help wants to be kind to another person down the road, and so on. Practicing random acts of kindness is something an enlightened spirit does without questioning.
It also aids in the enlightenment of an individual in their spiritual journey and in their daily life.
In Conclusion
By empowering the body, expanding the mind and enlightening the spirit, we become human. All our worldly endeavors are made less of a burden, because we can let ourselves use our freedom of choice and utilize all our faculties to the fullest. We can finally live without limitations and fear, because we know that our daily lives are working within a new holistic paradigm. When we are encouraged as individuals to live a truly holistic lifestyle, our daily lives become more manageable and we are no longer powerless.
Each daily lifestyle change that we undertake, allows for a greater sense of balance in all daily life and the activities we engage in. As we become more practiced at using holistic methods everyday – we also learn to become more self aware and take an active role in changing our personal lives. Being in tune means our body, mind and spirit are acting together, as a harmonious force. Unity is what guides us, as we take steps towards a more fulfilling life and make better choices daily.
The end result being, we become an example to ourselves an others of a true human being.
