Pillars to a happy life

Pillars
My past 3 blog posts have been about my daily workouts which keep me happy. I thought I would expand on that. What I have below are the pillars I feel create an environment where humans can be at peace and find the happiness inside all of us. I think I will elaborate on each of these points in future blog posts.

Physical
- Working out 30 minutes a day
- Sleeping 6 to 8 hours a night
- Eating a balanced diet of 2000 or less calories, or eating until slightly hungry

Mental (All of these are outside of your regular work day)
- Training the mind for 15 minutes a day. Meditation or some form of brain training (lumosity.com)
- Creative thinking for 15 minutes a day. Writing a blog, painting a picture, creating a food dish. The key is doing an activity which requires out of the box creativity on your part.

Social
- Do something daily involving people you do not see every day (share a meal, grab a coffee, attend a happy hour or networking event) or try something new with people you do see everyday (new restaurant, new bar, different activity or modified activity) for 15 minutes each day

Spiritual
- Train your spirit and find the inner peace inside you for 15 minutes a day.

Part 3: Spiritual Workout

The past 2 days I have talked about 2 of the 3 workouts (physical and mental) I do daily. The final of the 3 workouts I do daily is a spiritual one. This may seem weird to the majority of you, even folks who may identify themselves as spiritual/religious.

Before I talk about what I do for my spiritual workout, I think it’s good if I define spirituality. Spirituality is a tool I use to find my inner peace, awareness and joy. Like the body is a tool used to perform physical tasks and the mind is a tool used to perform thinking tasks spirituality is a tool used to find my inner spirit/peace. I view religious practices and rituals also as tool to help one find inner spirit/peace and they have their place.

So what do I do for my spiritual workout? Right now I am primarily re-reading the Power of Now and Awaken a New Earth by Eckhart Tolle and using them to find my inner peace. I find that his writings help me find my inner spirit/peace much as reading the Bible or Koran help others. As I finish the books and start another re-reading of them I plan to start writing a document about how best I can re-find my inner peace. I may even put together a power point for me to reference like an exercise training plan or my Lumosity training courses. I spend around 15-30 minutes doing this workout.

Finally out of all of the workouts I do that, I know that the spiritual one is the most important to my well being. It is unfortunate in the US society today the focus is heavily on the physical and mental with less focus on the spiritual. Even then some of us regularly skip the physical and use our everyday work as a reason to not have to do the mental even though we know we could use a mental refresher of trying something different.

I guess my key message is that if in the US we spent 1 to 1.5 hours a day out of our busy schedules to exercise, train our thinking to think differently and focused on our spiritual well being we’d better enjoy those remaining 14.5 to 16 hours and lead happier lives.

That’s it for now. I think my next post will be about my pillars to leading a happy life. Until tomorrow, Ciao.