Are you looking to live a more empowered, holistic lifestyle connected to your true nature?
In this article, I’m sharing four holistic lifestyle habits you can start doing today. I look at habits as something we create with practice, so we need to look at what we’re practicing. Practicing these habits will help you live more empowered, more holistically, and more connected to your True Nature.
Pay Attention to Your Full Being
When we practice paying attention to the whole of our being, we’re going to, by default, start living more holistically.
When we’re paying attention to all areas of our being, we have so much greater capacity to be empowered in our life and our life processes.
We want to be paying attention to our thoughts. This includes our mindset, the stories we’re telling ourselves, the things we’re saying to ourselves, about ourselves, about others, and about life – our complaints, our judgments, etc. We want to be mindful and aware of all of these.
We also want to notice our emotions. Our emotions are often generated from the thoughts we have, and they can also be generated by the traumas and experiences we’ve had, which live in us as thoughts, stories, and experiences we tell ourselves could happen again or are something to be afraid of. Emotions can be generated based on our past history or what we’re thinking in the moment, and it’s important to be aware of what emotions are living in us.
We must also be aware of our body. What are our bodies telling us? Are we getting goosebumps in resonance with something? Are we finding ourselves contracting or shrinking back, feeling like something is unsafe and not right for us? Do we feel expansive or contractive in our body? Is our body giving us messages of a need for something, maybe rest or exercise? Maybe art and creativity? So much guidance lives in our body, and it’s important to learn to listen to it.
Much lives in our cellular structure that will inform us of what we need. We can also look at ourselves on a soul/spirit level, which might mean listening in stillness, the intuitive realm, the unseen realm, the areas of that quiet inner voice. That is the voice of our inner guidance, our Inner Wisdom.
When we start practicing attention toward all aspects of our being, our thoughts, emotions, body, and spiritual realm, we begin to be able to live differently, choose differently, act differently, and engage in relationships differently.
When I started learning to practice this, everything in my life became so much more coherent, cohesive and connected. I began to see the connections. I started to see where certain thoughts trigger certain emotions, and perhaps blocked me from achieving something, or being able to make a decision, or being able to communicate with someone.
When I started looking at all of these aspects and noticing where I am in my thoughts, in my emotions, in my body and in my soul/spirit realm, I was much more capable of making decisions and determining tasks that were appropriate for me.
For instance, I might be struggling with a decision, and my thoughts are telling me one thing while my heart or emotions are telling me something else. If I tune into my body, maybe there’s a reconciliation that can happen, and I can begin to understand and tune into what’s making it difficult to make this decision. Which part of me doesn’t feel like it’s in tune with the other parts? What fears might be showing up in the form of thoughts or in the form of emotions and old traumas?
If we’re trying to do a task and our thoughts are in one area thinking we should do something, but somehow we keep procrastinating or aren’t able to get something done or achieve something, chances are, something in the totality of our being is not coherent or able to sit down and do the work that we want to do.
When we take time and practice looking at the totality of our being, so much more is possible for us. We can act every day in everything that we do from a much more empowered and clear place.
Pay Attention to What You’re Ingesting
The second habit to consider is paying attention to what you’re ingesting, how well you’re digesting, and whether you’re effectively egesting.
Most of us have heard about ingestion and digestion, but egestion is simply the third stage in the process. We ingest something like food, we digest and we egest. In other words, we clear it out or we excrete it. That full process being effective is so important in terms of living more holistically.
We need to think about what we are ingesting. We don’t just ingest food. We ingest the air we breathe, the water we drink, the experiences we have. Everything visual is ingested through our senses. Anything sensory is ingested. What we touch, smell, taste, and see, all of that is ingested.
If you’re scrolling social media all day, or having screens on constantly, or something in the background, or noisy voices around you all the time, you’re ingesting all of that, and we’re usually not taking time to digest. All that we take in needs to be processed. If we’re on screens a lot, we can go for a walk in the woods to digest it and move energy through us.
Once we’ve digested, are we really getting rid of what we don’t need and keeping what we do need? Are we learning from the experience? Are we truly clearing things away or are we holding onto things? Maybe we talked to a friend and we’ve ingested their trauma and something that they’re struggling with, and we’re digesting it and contemplating, and then we forget to egest it and now we’ve taken it on rather than just taking it in. Egestion is something we rarely think about.
We want to be able to take things in without taking them on.
We must let things flow through us. We want to keep that process moving and constantly ask ourselves:
Am I getting stuck on something?
Am I not letting something go?
Am I holding on too tightly?
Am I not digesting my experience?
Am I taking in too much?
We want to be looking at the full ingestion to egestion process as a very powerful practice for living more holistically. That is an incredibly important piece of holistic living and something you can begin to do today.
Notice what you’re eating. Notice all of your sensory experiences, the noise around you, what’s happening, and start paying attention to them.
You don’t have to look at every single detail. We can become overwhelmed with all the details, but just start with one thing. Notice how well you’re able to digest that social media scrolling. Do you need to make sure that you have no screens before bedtime so it’s fully digested? You can let go of it through the evening and through the sleep time to egest it.
Notice How You’re Showing Up
Another habit we want to look at is the expression of self. This is a practice we should really be paying attention to every single day when it comes to holistic living.
How are we showing up?
How are we living? Are we engaging our creative side? Are we looking at the totality of our being and understanding what we need in terms of expressing ourselves as a full human being? Are we willing to express our emotions? Are we willing to communicate and voice our thoughts? Are we willing to pay attention to our body and express ourselves, perhaps through dance, rest, some other kind of movement, or physical intimacy? What is it that we’re doing to express ourselves in our totality?
You can start to see how these all work together to connect more to a holistic lifestyle, and are questions you can start asking yourself today.
Start noticing how you express yourself, what you need to express, what you’re not expressing, what you’d like to express, and how you might do that.
Connect with Nature
The final and the fourth habit to practice is Nature connection. I talk about this so much in many of my blogs.
All we have to do is sit with Nature for a while, be with it, notice its cycles, notice its rhythms, notice the interaction and the intertwining and the interweaving of everything that exists in Nature.
Then we begin to see how holistic life itself is.
If we remember that we are Nature, we are the bees, we are the trees and the river and the sky and the stars, we are all of that, how does it express itself within us? What is the archetype of the squirrel within us? How does it live in us? What is the archetype of the wind when we hear the wind rustling in the trees, and how is that living in us? We have all of these archetypes and all aspects of them within us.
When we can commune with Nature, it helps us commune with ourselves.
Nature helps us commune with our whole being, our thoughts, feelings, body and spirit. All of that begins to intertwine. These pieces are all so important as a way of looking at life more holistically, archetypically, metaphorically, and stepping back from making everything so literal or black and white. There’s so much gray area to be embraced.
When we can look at everything holistically, we begin to see that all is connected.
By seeing all of life as connected, we also begin to feel much more empowered. We’re able to see beyond getting tripped up thinking in one area or acting in one area of our life, and banging our head against a wall wondering why we struggle to solve this problem or or find that solution.
We need to step back. We need to look at the bigger picture in the way Nature behaves.
These are four simple habits you can begin to notice and practice today. One is paying attention to the totality of your being, your body, mind, spirit and emotions. The second is the cycle of ingestion, digestion and egestion. What are you taking in, processing, and letting go of? The third is giving attention to how you express yourself. Are you expressing the totality of your being, or are you only allowing one area of expression and not another, or only taking things as expressions of others instead of fully and truly connecting to your own creative expression. Finally, Nature connection is a powerful practice for living life more holistically. Go outside and listen to the birds, step out and feel the wind on your face, notice the plant in your living room, or spend time with your pet.
These are four powerful ways you can begin connecting more holistically right now, allowing for a more holistic and empowered lifestyle.
Let me know if these resonate and how you practice living holistically. I think these are unusual practices that we don’t tend to think about, yet are super important because they actually empower us to shift our way of being and align more with how and who we want to be.
For a video version about 4 Best Holistic Lifestyle You can Start Now, watch here:
