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December 9, 2013

How to be your best self

I thought about bringing my mental energy to a situation this morning and realized, why wouldn't I also bring my body and spirit to it as well? It's confusing sometimes to lead with a part of yourself. It's strange to think the rest of it will just tag along.

When you're working out, how much are you using your mind? When you're hard at work, is your body involved? And where is your spirit in all this? Everything is at play all the time, we've only falsely compartmentalized it because I suppose compartmentalization makes it easier for our body/mind/spirit to focus on one part of that trio. Which is kind of strange if you think about it more granularly. If you can never be without your body/mind/spirit and you choose one to concentrate on, then what's being toned down? Your whole being, right?

You're deciding to exclude one or multiple parts of yourself (or perhaps you don't consciously realize that's what you're doing) with yourself. It's not an oxymoron because by taking a part of yourself out of commission, you've diminished your being entirely. Can you actually direct your chi?

I'm not sure how Bruce Lee would have answered that. He comes to mind(/body/spirit) as the most famous example of someone who could truly control the energy inside of him. At 5'7", 140lb, he could bench press 400 lbs and propel people 10 ft back with a small gut punch. But was he directing his chi? Or was he suffusing his entire being with it?

I believe this is why so many spiritual teachers (at least those that don't aspire to some greatness from their followers) refer to the being as body-mind, or simply as an entity or self. There is much inherent confusion about who is in the room, who showed up, what they're looking for, what incentive drives them to do what.

The questions people ask are self-concerned, not necessarily selfish. They don't necessarily want something to the detriment of another or just because they seek instant gratification, but they are trapped in their self. A conglomerate of emotions and experiences they constantly mull over.

When they say, how can I get rid of these distracting thoughts? How can I be at peace? The first thing that must be defined is this "I". Unfortunately, in the settings that this question emerges in, primarily Eastern ashrams, or Western spiritual centers, this comes off as woo-woo and is easily dismissed. The question though is much more literal, much more analytical than that.

Who is it that wants to be at peace? Who is having these distracting thoughts? Is it the mind? Is it the spirit? Is it the pain the body feels or the frustration the mind interprets or the weight that burdens the spirit? Where's the connect and disconnect? What part of you must you get rid of, change, re-imagine, to be yourself?

How much of yourself must you trim to be a better version of yourself? This is a fair question when you're thinking of it from the perspective of a fragmented self - creating a difference between body, mind and spirit. There are character traits that we dislike in ourselves and wonder if were to eliminate them, would we be better people? Laziness, procrastination, selfishness, etc. We imagine who we would be if we didn't have these traits. How much better we'd function in the world, and how much people would appreciate us more. Whether it's self-help, a psychiatrist or a spiritual guru, we go and seek a solution to eliminate these traits we perceive to be negative.

The question always comes back to the origin, the source of the problem. The root cause. Why do you have this trait to begin with? Who has it? Where did it come from? Does it exist in a vacuum? Is it a part of your culture? Are you lazy without others being more relatively active? Perhaps what you're trying to accomplish is very difficult? Not beyond your reach necessarily, but complex in its own right?

No man is an island. It's not a saying just to preserve a sense of community, it's a fact. We exist relative to our environments. Even if we hermit ourselves away, we're still not free from the place we inhabit. Our being, our self, our body/mind/spirit is always involved, all the time. There's no separating these parts of yourself. Your whole being is trying to separate itself then, and to what end? Eliminating a character trait you dislike is something you have to deal with in its entirety. Don't approach a problem halfway with a part of yourself. It just creates more fog. Go to the root always.