Paul Brian
If I told you that you’re not living your best life, you’d probably agree with me.
But what if you’re not even living your life?
What if you’re living out the expectations, roles and social conditioning that’s been put on you without your knowledge?
For far too many of us, that’s a daily reality.
But fortunately there’s a way to turn that around and completely own your life.
11 ways to free your mind spiritually and live your best life
1) Be true to yourself
The best place to start if you’re looking for ways to free your mind spiritually and live your best life is to be true to yourself.
What does this mean?
It means the following:
- Be honest with yourself about what you think, feel and want.
- Be honest with yourself about your experiences, both painful and joyful.
- Be honest with yourself about what’s most important to you in life, love and career.
Being true to yourself involves a commitment.
It’s a promise to yourself that you won’t lie to yourself or gloss over the truth just for temporary comfort.
It’s also a promise to yourself that you’ll live your life authentically, instead of to please the expectations and ideals of others.
As Celes writes for the Personal Excellence blog:
“Stop trying to please other people or to be someone else.
“It’s better to be an original version of yourself rather than be an exact duplicate of someone else.”
2) Embrace your painful emotions
Another one of the most important ways to free your mind spiritually and live your best life is to embrace your painful emotions.
When many of us feel angry, abandoned, hurt, confused or anxious, our instinct is to run.
We plaster on a smile and tell everyone we’re fine.
We may even lie to ourselves and tell ourselves we’re doing great.
But we’re not.
And this relates back to the last point as well about being true to yourself.
A big part of that is acknowledging painful emotions as valid.
You don’t need to “wallow” or be indulgent. Just be real:
There are reasons you’re feeling the way you do, there are struggles you’re going through and there are situations which are challenging you.
That’s OK. And your reactions can be valid expressions of your own existence.
One of the things I hate about a lot of modern psychology is how it pathologizes many healthy emotions, causing people to worry they are very sick for feeling depressed after the death of a loved one…
Or anxious after a huge health scare.
Just remember:
Your emotions often have much more valid roots than people trying to tell you what they mean or why they are “bad.”
3) Liberate your mind from toxic spirituality
Next up is the very crucial subject of spirituality.
Even if you don’t consider yourself a very “spiritual” person, all of us try to look for some comfort and answers in life sooner or later.
We want to find inner peace, meaning and philosophies that resonate with us.
That’s a healthy instinct, and your desire to find enlightenment and a greater meaning to life is noble.
It’s something you should definitely pursue in order to live your best life.
But here’s the thing:
The thing with spirituality is that it’s just like everything else in life:
It can be manipulated.
Unfortunately, not all the gurus and experts that preach spirituality do so with our best interests at heart. Some take advantage to twist spirituality into something toxic – poisonous even.
I learned this from the shaman Rudá Iandé. With over 30 years of experience in the field, he’s seen and experienced it all.
From exhausting positivity to downright harmful spiritual practices, this free video he created tackles a range of toxic spirituality habits.
So what makes Rudá different from the rest? How do you know he’s not also one of the manipulators he warns against?
The answer is simple:
He promotes spiritual empowerment from within.
Click here to watch the free video and bust the spiritual myths you’ve bought for the truth.
Rather than tell you how you should practice spirituality, Rudá puts the focus solely onto you.
Essentially, he puts you back in the driver’s seat of your spiritual journey.
4) Care for your body and physical health
One of the best ways to free your mind spiritually and live your best life is to care for your body and physical health.
This may sound basic, but it’s actually deep.
As the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche said, “there is more wisdom in your body than in your deepest philosophy.”
My own journey really began making sense when I learned to stop being so much inside my own mind.
I’d spent years being hyper-analytical, self-critical and obsessed with my own life story.
I’d spent the majority of my days buying into the inner monologue that would run through my head, both good and bad.
But it wasn’t until I learned to get into my body that I started experiencing real improvements.
It wasn’t until I started really exercising, eating healthy foods, enjoying the sun and swimming in fresh water that I began to experience the kind of spiritual invigoration I’d been searching for.
Many of the answers you think are buried in an old philosophy book are actually whispering through the forest leaves right now, if you’d just go listen…
5) Find the funny side
Life hits all of us with things we don’t expect and experiences we never thought we’d be having.
There’s really no way around that.
As they say, you can’t change the wind, but you can adjust your sails.
And one of the best things I’ve always found about life is humor.
Certain experiences in the past left me completely bewildered and overwhelmed, but I learned to cling to humor as a kind of life raft.
Learning to laugh in the face of chaos is an ongoing activity.
It’s a process and a commitment.
And it’s one of the best ways to free your mind spiritually and live your best life.
You have a heart of compassion and care.
But you also have a bellyful of laughter.
And when the world gets too crazy, sometimes you just need to let it out!
6) Discover your purpose
If you’re looking for ways to free your mind spiritually and live your best life, you need to know your purpose.
Many of us don’t have the foggiest idea.
That’s because finding your purpose isn’t something that our society prioritizes.
Sure, we’re told to figure out what our talents are, how to get a good career, or how to market ourselves.
But what about our inborn, unique purpose.
Well..
What would you say if I asked you what your purpose is?
It’s a hard question!
And there are far too many people trying to tell you it will just “come to you” and to focus on “raising your vibrations” or finding some vague kind of inner peace.
Self-help gurus are out there preying on people’s insecurities to make money and selling them on techniques which really don’t work for achieving your dreams.
Visualization.
Meditation.
Sage burning ceremonies with some vaguely indigenous chanting music in the background.
Hit pause.
The truth is that visualization and positive vibes won’t bring you closer to your dreams, and they can actually drag you backwards into wasting your life on a fantasy.
But it’s hard to free your mind and improve your life when you’re being hit with so many different claims.
You can end up trying so hard and not finding the answers you need that your life and dreams begin to feel hopeless.
You want solutions, but all you’re being told is to create a perfect utopia inside your own mind. It doesn’t work.
So let’s go back to basics:
Before you can experience a real change, you need to really know your purpose.
I learned about the power of finding your purpose from watching Ideapod co-founder Justin Brown’s video on the hidden trap of improving yourself.
Justin used to be addicted to the self-help industry and New Age gurus just like me. They sold him on ineffective visualization and positive thinking techniques.
Four years ago, he traveled to Brazil to meet the renowned shaman Rudá Iandê, for a different perspective.
Rudá taught him a life-changing new way to find your purpose and use it to transform your life.
After watching the video, I also discovered and understood my purpose in life and it’s no exaggeration to say it was a turning point in my life.
I can honestly say that this new way of finding success by finding your purpose actually helped me to enormously improve my own life and relationships.
7) Link your thoughts to your actions
One of the most important ways to free your mind spiritually and live your best life is to link your thoughts to your actions.
This is basically about selection.
You can’t choose everything you think, after all.
But you can choose what to do with it.
The most disempowering thing you can do is entertain and speculate an endless chain of thoughts that aren’t related to your actual life.
The most empowering thing you can do is to choose to pursue thoughts which are linked to your life, purpose and goals.
The second option is one of the most important habits of ridiculously successful people.
The first habit is one of the habits of a loser.
By linking your thoughts to your actions, you unlock one of the biggest life hacks in the world:
You become a doer, instead of a dawdler.
8) Pay attention to how you’re keeping score
All of us keep score in some way or other.
It may be our social status, our looks, our age, our net worth, our job or our relationships and friendships.
It could be our job titles or promotions, our properties we own and our languages we speak or subjects we’re experts on.
These all have worth, and are all potentially wonderful aspects of our life experience.
The problem occurs when we begin to link our own identity and existence to what we own and have.
Everything in the physical world is temporary and will one day pass away, including ourselves.
When we define our identity by what we have and the status given to us by society, we build our life on a shaky foundation.
Being aware and proud of your accomplishments is wonderful.
But try your best to minimize how much you keep score by the point system of the external world.
You just might find yourself getting conned when all the chips are counted up at the end of the game.
9) Work on your relationship with money
One of the other ways to free your mind spiritually and live your best life is to work on your relationship with money.
Many of us have strong emotional relationships to money and the concept of money.
We may feel extremely anxious, upset or depressed about money, or we may feel very egotistical, happy and superior based on money.
The truth is that money is just a tool.
It’s all about what you do with it, and what you do to get it and generate it for yourself and others.
It’s not inherently good or bad.
And there’s absolutely nothing wrong with earning money.
In fact, it can provide you a lot of the freedom and space you need to truly chase your dreams and begin to help others also pursue their dreams and passions.
Which is a wonderful and liberating thing.
Having a proactive and realism-based relationship with money helps you be able to focus on your spiritual development and quality of life without many of the financial stresses that end up sinking people.
If you can get your financial situation secured, you stand a much greater chance of being able to live your best life and become who you want to be.
10) Identify the scripts you’ve been fed
Every single one of us is fed with many scripts and narratives that try to tell us how to live, why to live and what to do with our lives.
Becoming aware of the words, emotions and thoughts which have been fed into you is an important part of self-awakening.
It’s not that these narratives are all negative or disempowering, it’s that they are external.
They come from outside us, not inside us.
And what’s inside us is what we want to find our way back to and start from.
In other words:
A lot of who you believe you are has been shaped by the emotions, ideologies and agendas of other people and other interests.
You may ultimately decide that some of these ideologies and emotions align with your own purpose and what you seek in life.
But to even do this you first must become aware of what has built you that you weren’t previously aware of.
Myths are an ancient form of narrative, and every culture has various scripts that are foundational to its people and their lives.
What scripts and myths were foundational to you?
Think about what you were taught by your parents, your religion (or lack of religion), your educational system and your culture?
What values did it instill in you? What priorities? What hatreds, what celebrations?
Becoming aware of this is one of the most crucial ways to free your mind spiritually and live your best life.
11) Find friends you can share with
Friendship is one of the wonderful experiences of life which can brighten even the most humdrum situation.
When we connect with those around us we begin to learn more about ourselves and others in positive ways that help us grow.
The same is true about learning more about ourselves and connecting to ourselves as well as romantic relationships.
These are all processes in which we can either go down a path of limitation, convention and dishonesty or liberation, unique self-expression and radical honesty.
Choosing the second option ensures that we will live our best life.
Most importantly, it ensures we will live our life instead of someone else’s.
And at the end of the day that’s a very valuable thing that nothing else can replace.
Where do we go from here?
The list of ways to free your mind spiritually and live your best life is a good starting point.
Next up is all about putting these tips into action, and establishing powerful daily habits that reinforce the path you’re on.
Freeing your mind is really about making your own decisions.
We can’t control all the messages and influences that enter our mind.
But we can become conscious of them and choose which narratives will build the foundations of our world.
We can become conscious of ourselves and our priorities and learn to become architects of our own lives instead of stewards of somebody else’s house.
This is your life.
Go out and live it!
