#56 - Creating Winning Spiritual Practices
At the beginning of 2021, many of us tried to incorporate different disciplines and routines for the sake of self development. While some were successful, others fail to do so and ended up feeling more dejected than when they first started.
Spiritual practices are equally important, if not more, since there are many issues a person faces that can be resolved by a sound spirit. Because a healthy soul and spirit leads to a healthy mind and body as well.
So take out your pens and papers and jot down how you can create and implement winning spiritual practices in your daily life.
Prayer is vital, it’s like oxygen to the body
Why spiritual habits are important
Curating your mornings is fundamental to put you in a healthy state of mind, heart, spirit and body
Spiritual practices lift you up and help you connect to the divine and to your sense of purpose
Constructing and revising the rituals will lead you to create a sense of limitlessness in your mind, heart, spirit and body
The things you do should be connected to your North Star Goal
Going for your day
Spirituality is about being happy in spite of what’s happening in the external world, not conforming to it
Find your way to keep that fire burning brightly
Episode Transcript:
Andrew Love: Welcome back to Love Life and Legacy Podcast dedicated to helping you navigate these hyper sexualized times of ours and win, just win at everything in life. And today's episode I'm going to be, it's a solo cast with me, and I'm getting into the essence of this episode is like how to create a really powerful spiritual life, and to curate your days so that you're really wide awake and on fire for life, so that you're much more likely to live in wholeness and much less likely to do stupid things that are going hurt you in the long run. And so yeah, please enjoy. I mean, we're always so happy to help you in any way possible, and I feel like one area that we haven't been focusing enough on is the spiritual lives of people. We're very practical so I want to delve into that today and I hope you enjoy.
Welcome back to the podcast, everybody, Andrew Love here. And where I'm at right now is it's like the last day of the year 2020, and I'm going to record this and then I'm going to go pick up some of the best bacon you've ever had. If you're a vegan and vegetarian, you might want to plug your ears here because I'm not and I married a Mongolian and they essentially just eat sheep while they're still alive. They floss their teeth with sheep so veganism is not yet on our horizons. Anyway, not to get into that, which I've already done. But we're going to get some bacon and just have a cookout here in Bali tonight so I'm excited about that. But before I do, I'm recording this solo cast which is always fun, I really like it, but it's also challenging because I'm a speaker, I speak a lot.
So I'm going to try to keep this concise, I'm going to try to keep this informative and very practical. A lot of times, we in the podcast, try to help you sort out big ideas so that you can make sense of all these different factors involved in your recovery, in your journey towards sexual integrity. And it's really important that you do understand the stakes, the high stakes game that you're in, and who's in control of things like what you see on the internet. There's a few very powerful forces that are controlling the current of what happens online. So it's important that you understand the macro but it's also important that you understand the micro as well. How to move within this chess board, if you're a chess piece you need to know what's my next move. And so, I wanted to get into that today in terms of the practical need for spirituality because a lot of times spirituality is marketed and even practiced in a very esoteric and impractical feelings based kind of way.
All that frustrations with that crowd of people like: I'm very spiritual, I go I shop at Whole Foods, I'll need organic because I'm spiritual. And that's the extent of their spirituality and if that's where they're at, great. I'm not trying to judge people, I want to evolve the conversation to a much more useful way of spirituality. And as it pertains to building sexual integrity, it's really important that you develop your own spiritual practices, it's hugely important.
And a lot of people think that they're confined to a certain amount of spiritual practices, they think: Oh okay, there's only Hoon Dok Hae, so reading scripture and it's got to be at this time, and I have to do it in this way. I have to read this many pages and then they think: Okay, I have to pray this way in this position otherwise, it's not a real prayer because I can't pray doing a handstand. That's crazy. I can't pray underwater. That's insane. It's got to be on my knees, It's got to be hands crossed or whatever, we have these concepts. And although it is really important to adhere to a certain regimen, I love Hoon Dok Hae because it calls you to focus on the word and to extrapolate meaning from something very big and broad, and how you can then apply it during the day.
So Hoon Dok Hae is great prayer. Obviously prayer is like oxygen to your spirit, it's vital, but how you do these things is another question. And then adding more, getting your basic essential vitamins and nutrients is great, but if you want a very active life you're going to need to learn about electrolytes. You're going to need to learn about collagen, we don't get enough collagen in the West because we eat chicken breast and that doesn't have any collagen. In the East, they eat a lot of soups that have the bones of the animals, again, sorry vegans, and that gives us the collagen we need.
So that becomes really important, your diet isn't really important to be honest, if you don't want to do anything with your life. If you just want to surf on the couch, as they say, couch surfing where you just lie down and watch Netflix all day. If that's your goal in life, then your diet doesn't matter and one day in the future, you will just basically have a heart attack and die. And maybe that's all you strive for in life is watching as many movies as possible, in which case, this podcast might not be the best podcast for you, there's probably a better podcast called the Human Potato.
But in terms of spirituality, it's the same. It doesn't really matter if you pray or anything, if you don't want to do anything with your life, if you're okay with being frustrated and struggling with pornography indefinitely and it doesn't really matter that you hold on to any bad habits or anything. But if you really want to kick the habit, if you want to make 2021 a delicious scrumptious year that you can't wait to just take a bite out of, sorry I just started thinking about a hamburger. Man, that's weird. If you're a vegan, I'm very sorry, I don't know what's happening today. But I just really want a hamburger.
So if you want next year to be such that you've never experienced so much joy in your life and freedom in your life, and that's up for grabs by the way, you can have more enjoyment, life satisfaction than ever before, if that becomes a priority for you. If that's really where you want to be in life, and you're sick and tired of just struggling in these self- defeating loops again and again and again, then what you're going to need to do is develop some razor sharp spiritual habits, things that you won't let go of, things that you understand that give you superpowers. And I want to get into that a bit because there's some things that you can do right now that can transform everything.
First of all, curating your mornings is fundamental. I can measure my level of stress and anxiety, comparatively, if I compare a morning that I just woke up without an alarm, I wake up when my kids wake me up and I just go about my day and have breakfast. The stress that I experience on a day like that versus when I wake up because of an alarm, I go through my morning routines of breathing meditation and some sort of workout before my kids wake up is like the first example of me waking up whenever my stress levels are at least tenfold throughout the day on a consistent basis, versus the sheer and utter joy that I can experience regardless of my circumstances if I just make the habit of getting up at a certain time and doing certain things. So that's why I want to leave it a little bit loose for you like what time would that be, because that's the first part of your day, waking up and what you do next. If you wake up and reach for your phone and check social media, then your day is going to be exactly like the day before because you're just reminding yourself about yesterday and all the things that you think about yourself rather than recreating yourself in the day to come.
So the first step is curating your morning so that means, when do you wake up? What is your routine when you wake up, and it could be any combination of things that puts you in a healthy state of mind and heart and spirit and body like, whatever you can do, and again, there's infinite possibilities. There can be listening to your favorite song and dancing like crazy and getting into the best mood ever, that could be texting five people and saying you love them, it could be a consortium of things. But it should involve lifting yourself up and connecting to the divine and connecting to your sense of purpose, who are you going to be and what are you going to do?
And then attacking the day, what I've found is a lot of people are stuck with bad habits. They are in a constant state of feeling like a victim even when they make a mistake. They say, I did it because I'm out of control or my habit made me do this or whatever. That's just like they've given up any sense of responsibility for what they do, for their actions so when you wake up in the morning, you create this routine, it's called priming yourself or finding yourself at a certain resonance of life where anything can happen because you're in a state where your mind is wide open, and like: What can I do today? And your heart is wide open and you're like: Wow, God is real. I have a heavenly parent that loves me that wants me to win, that wants me to change the world like when you're in that kind of state. Good luck having a bad day.
But when you wake up groggy and cranky, and then the first thing you do is look at your phone, and it makes you even crankier or you start to compare yourself and then you just feel bad. Good luck having a good day. So how you start your day is crucial, and then what you do next is also very important. I know a lot of people who do extensive prayer and Hoon Dok Hae and reading of scripture, but they never work on their temper and so they're the most religious angry people you've ever met, how useful is that? I don't think they're really necessarily getting much out of these habits, these routines, these rituals so first of all constructing the rituals, but also revising them, making sure that they're serving their purpose which is creating a sense of limitlessness in your mind, heart, spirit and body so that you go about a day without limits because that's when things get really, really exciting.
So there's the morning routines, and then there's what you're doing during the day, and I found, honestly, the best thing to do in terms of planning your day is to not write it on your phone, write it on a piece of paper. I invested a decent amount of money in a really nice leather bound, again, with the leather and the meat, I'm sorry vegans, but this time it's leather. I think it could be plastic, let's just say it's plastic, and everybody can be happy, except for the environment. Sorry, there's no winning in this. But I bought a really nice, empty journal with lines so that every day I can write in a really nice pen. I invested some money in a really nice pen so that I enjoy the process of give and take with this empty page and I write out the things that I want to do and why I want to do them, and then I cross them off. The satisfaction level of crossing something off with a pen is outlandish, it's like the cheapest thrill you can get is crossing off a thing that you did because what that represents is you're moving towards a life that you can be happy about because you did it. You did the thing that you said you're going to do, that's integrity.
So finding your way to plan out your day, and then just go for it, just go for it. When you're so enthralled with your life, there is so little room for you to want to escape that life so the temptation to waste time online becomes much less because why would you if you're having a really good conversation, you don't want to reach out for your phone and check your status on social media, you don't care. It's like that time and space ceases to exist when you're together with somebody and having an engaging conversation. It's in the moments where we don't know what to do with ourselves when we're waiting for somebody alone at a restaurant or we're bored and we pick out our phone, and then we just waste time because we have nothing to do with our minds and we just want a distraction.
So it's crucial that you have things to do during the day that are connected to your North Star Goal. If you don't know what a Northstar Goal is, go to the episode about a North Star Goal. I was saying that in a very sloppy way, so North Star Goal. And we have an entire podcast episode about that, that's a huge part of what we're all about and that means being connected to a future that's so exciting, I can't help but want to put energy into that every single day. And the more that you build it, you're growing it into this big beautiful offering that you're manifesting and you're making it substance, and that's super exciting.
So there's a morning routine, then there's setting up your day, and then there's just going for your day. And this is where accountability comes in because if you have an accountability partner, you'd say: This is what I'm going to do today, I'm going to do this, this and this; and this is why it's connected to this great big goal that I have for my life. I want to be this kind of person, I want to live this kind of life. And then you tell them that and then at the end of the day, you say whether you did it or not. And that becomes your story, that becomes your autobiography written by daily entries, day after day. You're writing your story and if your story is a happy story, then it means that you're ending your days with: I did it and I learned this, and I did this and I did this. If you're kind of writing a story for yourself, that's very sad then it's: Oh no, I failed to do this. I didn't do this. I got distracted. I didn't do this.
And then you can see your own autobiography in real time, your journal becomes your autobiography. Do you understand that point? I hope you do. Because you don't have to look back 40 years later and say, What did I do with my life? No, you can look at your life every day and say: This is what I did with my life. I'm either happy with it or I'm not happy and I'm going to make some adjustments tomorrow. And every day becomes an opportunity to get better and better at just living life to its fullest.
And then the last, evening routine, so how you end your day is crucial. What time you go to bed, what you do before bed, I've deleted all social media from my phone recently. It was a one by one process. I realized, Holy moly, I go into my phone and my thumb is continually going towards Facebook. I deleted it, took me like two weeks to really admit it to myself and to get rid of it that I was wasting time not feeling good, not getting anything out of the exchange using the excuse that I have work to do on it. But really, I could just use my computer and that's why I should be doing my work anyway, so I deleted it.
And then next was Instagram, and then last was YouTube. Now they're all gone from my phone. I feel amazing, these are all distractions. I was wasting a good 45 minutes to an hour on YouTube every single night, and I was watching educational stuff a lot of the time but sometimes I'd click on that celebrity being interviewed and caring about what they say about stuff and be like: Wow, this is storage in my brain that I'd rather not be wasted on what Robert Downey Jr. thinks about AI or something, who cares, that was really another excuse.
And I realized that hour for me between 10 and 11 was this ghost hour that I would lose very often because of YouTube so boom, gone. Now, none of these are on my phone, and I'm just straight up. I have all this time, all of a sudden. The other day, I was walking around my house and I was just like: What do I do? It was this beautiful new situation that I never had because any extra time I'd be spending, learning online or something but I'd always be plugged in to the internet. And now I have these golden hours to spend with more with my wife, to meditate more and to do a bunch of other stuff.
So your nighttime routine needs to be really razor sharp as well. So experimenting with when do you turn off your phone? What do you read before bed? Do you breathe? Do you drink some warm tea that calms me down? Do not drink anything at all otherwise, you'll wake up and need to pee. Like learning about what your body needs? I always stretch before bed, I always stretch first thing in the morning and last thing at night. I also do meditation in the morning and at night. What are the thoughts you want to think? How do you want to feel as you go to bed, going to bed worried about something causes you to have really crappy sleep.
So again, creating this nighttime routine, morning routine and then getting accountability for attacking your day, your life will be utterly different. So this is essential if you want to, all of the things that I'm talking about are essentially just like how to curate feelings, and how to experience life because you don't need to get a new job to be happy. If you like your job, if you are bored at your work, it's a lot of times just because of how you view your work. You don't like a lot of people I've met, they get bored with their marriage and they go through this esoteric crisis, and they say: I don't know what if we weren't meant for each other? What if there's somebody else that's better for me? And it's just because they haven't exercised the muscle of seeing their wife or their husband, new again, they're just seeing them with the same old eyes. And since they themselves are not growing, they feel like their circumstances are the reason that is keeping them stuck, but it's the other way around.
You don't need to change your external world in order to feel happy. You need to change how you experience your external world, that's what spirituality is. It's how you experience life, and if your spirit is engaged, you can't help but get excited because you see the opportunity, you can help more people, you can see what is true more in yourself and in your environment. You can follow or pursue things that would normally seem scary because all of a sudden you have this newfound boldness, that's the advantage of having a strong spiritual life.
So in our movement, we have certain things that we do. We have family pledge, you know unseal. We have Hoon Dok Hae. we have praying in a certain way, ending our prayers in a certain way and these are all really important. That's part of our culture, they help give us context and it's like a language that we speak. So we can speak a common language and it's very wonderful. But there's also the fact that you need to find your own way to really spark that light inside of you and keep that light burning brightly. And I know True Mother in the Madison Square Garden talk that she gave, back in 2018, she was talking about being the lights of this world that shine brightly. That means that to be alive and to be burning with passion and desire, and that's an internal thing.
So first of all, you got to find your way to keep that fire burning brightly. Show those goals every single day, make sure that you have a raging fire within because then your life starts to take on a whole new meaning and you will want to escape it less, and you'll be more engaged and less likely to do stupid self destructive things that are going to bite you in the butt in the long run.
So I hope this was helpful. Just to summarize, if you got lost in all my words, I'm really just pitching you the idea of this year, investing a lot into how you wake up, when you wake up, and what you do to produce a certain feeling, a certain spark within you? So some people think they need to read 1,000 pages of Hoon Dok Hae and read Hoon Dok Hae for four hours. I don't think that's really the point. The point is that you engage with the Word of God, and that creates a spark within you to want to then attack the day, then the next thing is having accountability for what you're going to do that day, write it down and ideally, let somebody know. This is what I'm going to do today and to chase after life.
And then at the end of the day, to have a really great evening routine, so that you can let go of any of the difficulties and let it pass through you, and then hold on to all the possibilities so that you can go to bed excited and can't wait for tomorrow, and have some of the best sleep of your life. So it's important that you experiment with customizing your spiritual life by trying new ways of doing things, trying new things. For me, meditation was new a couple years ago, it revolutionized my life. There's a lot of different things that you can adapt to. So I challenge you to do this for the sake of building more integrity in your life, more excitement, more spirituality, and to really be the light of this world, to be radiant individuals and radiant couples. So good luck, thank you. And Happy New Year from here, even though it's already new year, by the time you listen to this.
Andrew Love here, and I wanted to plant a seed in your mind before you go. You see a lot of people when they start to consume our content, they listen to our podcasts, they watch our videos, they read our blogs, they start to believe in the idea of freedom as a possibility for them and their lives, and it is. You can break free from porn, you can build amazing eternal relationships but it requires you to make the jump. It requires you to commit to transformation, and that only happens when you invite other people into your journey. You see, a lot of people think that because I got into porn by myself, I can get out of it by myself and that's the wrong thinking.
It's not about simply removing a negative force from your life, it's about creating fulfillment and connection and intimacy with other people. So we really recommend first and foremost that you build a team of accountability partners, facilitators, group members and we can do that. We have all of that waiting for you, but you need to first reach out to us. If you already have people in your life that you think can help you, we have online courses that will teach you both how to create a dynamic that works in terms of accountability. But if you don't have an accountability partner, we already have volunteers who are waiting for somebody to help. We have groups that are waiting for somebody like you, but your role and your job is to merely reach out to us and we can work together with you to create a powerhouse team so that you can build the life of your dreams. We look forward to hearing from you.