Where Are You Living from These Days?
The what and how of everything.
Work hard, exercise, eat healthy, sleep well, keep learning new skills, be a good partner, don't use plastic.
If we allow it, society will eat up our lives with its endless external demands. What a handy skill it is to stop and acknowledge what wants to come out of us from within. Let’s do an exercise.
Step 1: What are your core values? Pause for a second and write them down.
Step 2: Now list the things you have done in the last three days. Everything. From grocery shopping to working, including meeting friends, and resting listening to your favorite record.
Step 3: Time to connect the two lists. Go item by item you have done and ask yourself these two questions:
- The what: Why did I do that, to what value was it connected?
- The how: How did I do it, what was I feeling as I was doing this? Was any of my values present?
Be honest. Don’t force-connect every action to a value; see what fits in naturally. If an activity is not connected to any of your values naturally, the point is to reflect: Why am I doing this, really? Can I bring a different energy to this activity and thereby change how I am living my life, or should I just do less of it?
Step 4: Are any of your values represented in the list not being exemplified in your life? If the answer is yes, do something to correct that.
Here are my core values: Joy. Self-expression. Deep connection. Beauty. Honesty. Presence. Agency. Self-nourishment. Meaning. Respecting the bigger flow of life.
As I see it, I can work on something serious and well structured, but how I do it is up to me: can I bring agency, presence, and meaning to it? Can I grocery shop with a pinch of joy?
Here is a simple example of values defining our priorities. Almost two months ago my dishwasher broke. Given certain old installations in my apartment, getting a new one is not a fast plug-and-play situation. It’s not impossible either, but it requires expert work. I live alone so doing the dishes is not the end of the world. It will get fixed in another month, but it doesn’t need to get fixed as soon as it broke. It is not a matter of life and death. If I treated it as such, I know I would be mostly avoiding my priorities by “getting things done”. My mind and society’s busyness modus operandi won’t trick me on this; I choose to respect a bigger flow of life with awareness.
The point of values is to live them; to use them as our north in our decision-making. That is in terms of actions we take but also the mood we cultivate in our lives, the place we live from.
Final step: put a few minutes on fear and see how many of our actions and moods actually come from a place of fear. Fear of having no money, of suffering, of not finding another job, of not being liked, of causing an argument if something does not happen in a certain way, etc.
I can organize the kitchen beautifully to avoid an angry partner and avoid a mess, or I can do it out of joy given how much my partner and I enjoy a clean kitchen. The same action can be done from a place of love or fear/suffering avoidance. It’s up to each one of us what we are focusing on. Whatever we cultivate grows on us.
There’s a great gap between what we tell ourselves and how we act. The idea is to reduce the gap between these two, to live in alignment. At the end of the day, a well-lived life is what matters, and we do that consciously by living from within.
Good thing we can always be kind to ourselves and fine-tune our lives at any given moment.
Hi, I am Aline Ra M, spiritual guide, energy worker, and tea lover.
