Lifestyle Emotions and Habits

The main ideas from this information are: - Living in alignment with God and being authentic means living from the heart and self-mastering, not being controlled by the ego. - In day-to-day life, it's important to make conscious choices that make us feel good and healthy. - Building healthy habits, like exercise and meditation, can lead to feeling good and energetic. - It's important to be conscious of how we spend our time and who we spend it with, as it can influence our emotions and energy. - Being authentic and evolving as a person doesn't mean being perfect, but consciously making decisions and being aware of our emotions. - Managing our energy, being mindful of our emotions, and creating a healthy lifestyle are important for self-mastery and emotional well-being. A big part of this theory of the authentic self and the Christian religious view of that being living in alignment with God, it's about living from the heart and self-mastering. Mastering our heart, living a fully authentic life and not being controlled by the ego. I suppose once the real conceptual and spiritual insight takes place and we make the big decisions about our lives and love and relationships and work, but there's also a very practical day-to-day side of it, I think. It's all about, we live in this world so full of choices and we have an infinite number of positive things that we can have in our lives, whether it's books that are so accessible, music, inspirational videos, through Skype and through the internet and transport we've got access to all our friends and family whenever we want. There are so many foods we can eat, everything is so good, we can eat extraordinarily healthy if we want to. But the complete opposite is true too. There is so much negativity and I've had to talk about all the institutions of the media, the business, politics, religion, school and how they all have their own agenda and it's not our authentic self. So in day-to-day life it's very easy to slip into just being unhealthy and not feeling good and having negative influences. So I just wanted to talk about the real practicalities of that and what I suppose at its deepest level we really have to, quite consciously, design our life. We don't just let things happen to us. So you have these choices, do I want to sleep until 7.30 and then just get up, shave and shower and go to work, or do I want to get up an hour earlier and exercise every morning and do a 5 or 10 minute meditation. Remembering that all of these things start off hard, but it takes about 21 days to build a habit and then you just do it and it feels good and you feed off the energy. And that's how all those people who we think are really special and disciplined, they're not really, they've just built a habit. So that's an example of a choice, or do you get home from work and just sit and watch the TV for a couple of hours, or do you do a class of yoga, do you listen to some classical music, do you eat Hungry Dax, or do you pay a bit extra and get some steamed salmon. Now this isn't to say, I think there's two, there's a lot of qualifications in all this, and my take on it is that the real underlying thing is we want to feel good, that's what we want. We want to feel emotionally good and healthy, and so all these things we do that in the bigger picture you look back and you say, well look it's not good for us that we do them because it makes us feel good, we're sleeping because it feels nice to sleep in. We eat potato chips because it feels nice, we watch that crap on TV because we're stressed out at work, and there's nothing wrong with doing any of those things, as long as they're done consciously. So you might just say, you know what, tonight I just want a packet of chips, and that's fine. Or tonight I'm going to have a few too many drinks because I just want to go, I want to live in the moment, be present, and I'm making a conscious decision, I'm going to have a good night tonight, and strictly speaking it will be a bit more than what I want. That's all fine, in fact that's part of being your authentic self and testing yourself and having the courage to spoil yourself occasionally. But it's the unconscious things, it's when all those things just become a habit and we stop getting any kind of kick out of them and they kind of just become who we are. So this isn't about the old Presbyterian thing about you've got to sacrifice and suffer and then you've got the long term benefit, no, that's all crap. You want to feel good, that's a given, but why not do it in a healthy way? You can watch a horror film that's deliberately designed just to make us feel better, or you can watch a really uplifting film, and both of them you're probably going to get this hit of goodness. The ego gets set in one and the hits are the same, but one of them is going to lead to you being an energetic person. So that's part of it, it's not in the kind of military way of we've got to be disciplined and tough, because that's crap, that's why none of, you know, it's about we want to feel good, we want to feel really good and really healthy, what are the healthy ways to do that? You know what the unhealthy ways are? I know I enjoy eating those potato chips, I know I enjoy sitting on my butt, at least initially I get that hit of sitting on my butt and having a beer and watching three hours of TV, but how do we kind of do that in a way that's actually healthy and that makes us feel good and that's actually authentic and that's conscious? And again it's not, again it's like everything, there's almost two extremes, we're not trying to be, deny ourselves, deny feeling good and be tough, so the classic example is we're not saying in the morning, get up and do this intense fitness routine of smashing weights for half an hour, because that's not everybody, what we're saying is what do you enjoy? Do you enjoy going for a walk? Do you enjoy going out on the beach and having a swim or walking your dog or doing yoga? Find some exercise you enjoy and just get in the habit of doing that on a regular basis and then you'll feel good and after a while the habit forms and you won't want to go back. And so, and this is something that it's not going to happen for anyone on day one, but you just be conscious of your lifestyle, think about it, how do you want to spend your time? Who do you want to spend your time with? What people give you energy and what don't, because you'll become a little bit like the people you're around. So it's thinking about all the things you love, and you know I love classical music, I love all music, music lifts me up, I don't listen to music enough, I don't really get anything out of watching TV, in fact I could probably go through the rest of my life without watching TV and be quite content. I like DVDs, love movies, but sports, good, but I don't need to see a lot of, that's another one of those conscious decisions, I would consciously go to the casino and go watch an NBA final with a friend and it would be a fantastic three hours and we'd spoil ourselves and treat ourselves and feel really good, but to just sit there and mindlessly watch a couple of games of footy every weekend to kind of numb the pain of life is just not a conscious healthy way. These are all things about how you grow and evolve to be a fully authentic person, and it's not like we're all going to be perfect from day one, and it's not even saying the goal isn't to be perfect. As I've said, you can consciously make decisions to do things and to have an awareness of your emotions and say, you know what, I really need this, I really need a good night out, and some drinks, I really need to just have the whole day to chill out and watch some sport, lay in the sun, and that's all fine, it's how you do it, is it consciously done or is it unconsciously done, it's kind of a negative habit. So, you know, in my lifestyle I've already built in the early morning exercise thing, which is great, and I just need to bring in some tests and some different things about how I do my evenings and music. I want to bring in some prayer and meditation elements into my lifestyle, and I want to be a little bit more creative with my friends, I want to think up things to do that are a bit uplifting and give more into my relationships, have a bit more courage in building new friendships and relationships, reading I love, I want to do that, so it's just about, you know, ultimately with very emotional things we feel and everything we experience in a day is an energy, and it's just about being conscious of that, so watch your energy, you know. I've got into this habit of just going on the internet at work and looking up these stories and it just feeds into my ego and my fears, it's a way of sort of numbing the pain and the stress I feel at work, and it's just having that ultimate awareness on a day by day, hour by hour basis about how we're feeling, and just being healthy, managing our emotions, and it's all learning and growing, and over the years you want to work towards sort of self-mastery, and that's the thing, we're in a fast-paced, intense world, so many things are thrown at us, so we almost need to, in our own minds at least, we need to have two or three hours of being in an urban rainforest every day, and we can't be in an urban rainforest, so we've got to kind of create that environment through music and scents and through the things that we expose ourselves to, through people, our interactions, so I need to focus a lot more on just sort of having this really, really healthy lifestyle, physical habits, spiritual habits, how I work with my relationships, how I, you know, be mindful at work, so that I plan my day, prioritise, and then jump into the moment and live mindfully in that, rather than, so it's all about this overall, authentic, sort of emotional health, which is what we need to be conscious of.