Balancing practical life and spirituality

[Identity]

So I have been watching actualized.org contend for quite some time and have been doing practices as well. However, I have done this mostly in isolation and it has been tough for me to share my worldviews and experiences with others. I wasn’t very aware I had this problem until a few months ago, when I experimented with a few chakra reading and healing sessions. Here it became clear to me that my throat chakra was “blocked” or whatever you call it. Anyways, since then I have been trying to communicate my path more with others, with mixed results. It has come to the point now that I have embraced this new identity quite a bit (not the end goal, but a step forward I think). Probably also the reason I am able to share this.

Anyways, because I have been sharing my worldviews more with others, I have come out of my own thought bubble and have gained opinions from others on what I am doing. I have just returned from a week-long yoga retreat. Here I talked for quite a while with one of the yoga instructresses. She told me that I should focus more on grounding myself, focus on mastering the lower chakra’s. Instead of doing a lot with of meditative and psychedelic practices I should focus more on working with my body. Also, I showed her my vision board and her opinion was that I should create way more tangible short-term goals. She told me I am getting into too many abstract notions and that I can get carried away into delusion easily if I don’t operate from a solid foundation. Some of the things she said made sense to me, but I’m also skeptical about it because of the big picture view she had. I would categorize her as stage green. She is a yoga instructor, but the stream of yoga deals mostly with physical aspects. Although she has more than 10 years of experience with meditation, she didn’t think of it as a method for discovering Truth. When I asked her about her views on enlightenment, she saw it mostly as delusion, the desire to escape reality or to feel special. Her focus was more on inner mastery, working with emotions, with the chakra system as one of her main conceptual models.

This got me thinking about how I am balancing my life, and what area’s I should be pursuing the most at this time. I would like to get some of your views on this. To be able to judge my situation, I will explain a bit about myself.

I’ve gotten into personal development around three years ago, before which I was a really lost lazy student. Mostly through watching actualized.org video’s I’ve been creating a vision for myself and bootstrapping myself up. It has gotten to the point now that my life has really started to get some direction and momentum going. Here is a picture of my vision board, which I am quite proud of ?:

So, on the bottom you see the different habits I have in place now. In the middle, it is more of a freestyle section, in which I try to write down a new statement every morning. Besides that you see some different domains I am pursuing. Have been working on my personal development mostly through creating this large picture vision and by getting the habits in place that support that vision. Although I am tracking my “productive hours”, I don’t work with any goal setting methods or have a lot of tangible goals.

Spirituality has been taking an increasingly large role in my life. I have been meditating consistently for half an hour a day for close to two years now. The last year or so I have been taking psychedelic mushrooms every two weeks. I also attend a meditative yoga class once a week. Besides those concrete habits, a lot of my time is spent just contemplating and self-inquiring throughout the day. I have been accessing mystical type states during psychedelics and meditation for some time, and it has started to spill over to my everyday life as well. Overall my spiritual pursuit and desire for Truth have really gotten some momentum.

At the same time I am at a pivotal moment in my life, with some practical domains demanding my attention. I am a 22 year old master student and in 1,5 years I have to go to the job market. I’ve got an idea what direction I want to go in, but it is not concrete enough yet and it needs time and effort to materialize. The end of my masters really feels like a deadline to me and it is important to not get sucked into wage slavery.

I’m in an awkward situation when it comes to girls. I had quite a bit of success about a year ago through RSD pick-upish type of methods. This started to feel really incongruent and unsatisfying though, and I turned away from dating for a while. In the meantime, I did inner work on myself and I feel like I now accept myself and my sexuality a lot more. I have started to see the results with girls as well, and feel like if I committed to this domain now, it could really start to blossom.

I used to be a quite popular guy with a lot of friends. Because I have changed so much and have really turned inwards I have been lonely lately. I left a lot of my old relationships behind me, that were more stage orange. I haven’t made many new friends though that share my new values, more stage greenish people. The people in my life now don’t understand the things I am pursuing and I have no one to share my experiences with. I could focus on building new relationships, but it would suck up a lot of my time.

It's not that I am not working on these issues as well, I certainly am. However, a lot of my energy right now is focused on spirituality. I’m investing a lot of my “points” into spirituality. Working on more mundane aspects of my life does not flow very easily at the moment, it costs me quite a bit of willpower to get practical things done.

I would love to hear your opinions on my situation: Should I prioritize the dream, or awakening from the dream? I mean, I realize it is not a one or the other decision, and I certainly have to find a balance. As my plans are right now though, I think I would be moving more into the direction of spirituality. At the moment this comes more natural to me and gives me more excitement. I am planning to increase my meditation habit to an hour a day, would like to do more yoga, more psychedelic trips, do retreats, read books on spirituality, etc. However, I am not sure that shifting the balance more towards spirituality would be a wise decision because of the number of practical things I have to get in place right now. Then again, I already notice right now how easily I get sucked into all type of activities. I could have some mystical insight or state for a bit and then all of a sudden for three days straight I am completely unaware of any of it.

 

 

 

 

 

 

[Gabriel Antonio]

17 minutes ago, Identity said:

She told me that I should focus more on grounding myself, focus on mastering the lower chakra’s. Instead of doing a lot with of meditative and psychedelic practices I should focus more on working with my body. Also, I showed her my vision board and her opinion was that I should create way more tangible short-term goals. She told me I am getting into too many abstract notions and that I can get carried away into delusion easily if I don’t operate from a solid foundation.

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[allislove]

Thank you for sharing. It was a great read. I can't really suggest anything since I am only at the beginning of the path of spirituality. But my ego is already worried about how it's going to influence my life purpose path. I think nobody can help you here. You need to find your own balance. Try to listen to intuition. Good luck.

[Identity]

@dimitri Thank you! Indeed I guess it's really up to me to find the right balance. Just writing it out and expressing it helped me to get some clarity already. Also, I just watched Leo's new episode in which he addresses exactly this point. I will make sure I don't slack in fixing the concrete parts of my life, and follow my intuition from there. Good luck to you as well! ?