Why 15 Minutes of Meditation Isn’t Enough: Integrating Spirituality into Daily Life | Holistic Happiness Club | EP 61

Meditation and mindfulness are wonderful practices, but are they enough to truly enrich our lives? In this episode of the Holistic Happiness Club, we dive deep into the idea that spirituality is more than just a few minutes of daily meditation. Discover why limiting spirituality to short bursts can prevent you from fully experiencing its transformative power. We explore practical ways to integrate spiritual practices into your everyday routine, helping you infuse meaning, peace, and mindfulness into every aspect of your life. Whether you're a seasoned spiritual seeker or just beginning your journey, this episode offers valuable insights on how to live a spiritually enriched life 24/7. Tune in and learn how to make spirituality a constant, uplifting presence in your daily life. 

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I come up with the topics I think are necessary for 360 degrees of happiness; when I say holistic happiness or 360-degree happiness, it includes health, Success, career, work life, social life, and every other aspect of life. I focus on mental health primarily, but mental health cannot be excluded from any aspect of life.


So, my focus is Happiness, which includes not only positive psychology like gratitude, mindfulness, surrender, forgiveness, letting go, etc., but also your success in life, be it in your career or anything else that you consider a success. I believe Happiness can only be inclusive.

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Transcript

0:00

Hello, everyone, and welcome back to another interesting episode of Holistic Happiness Club. And today's episode is about spirituality in daily life. I have seen that a lot of people have this notion that spirituality is something that we need to do 15 minutes or 30 minutes in the morning, sitting in the meditation or doing some mindfulness practice. And right after the practice is done, we go on with our life as usual, the business as usual. We do all sorts of silly mistakes that we do on a daily basis. And according to me, that's not the best way to practice spirituality in your daily life. According to me, spirituality is there to enhance our life, enhance our quality of life. And if we are not integrating spirituality in our daily life, in our daily actions, then we are missing 90% part of spirituality. Right? So in today's episode, I will be talking about how you can integrate spirituality in your daily life and why you must integrate spirituality in your daily life. So lot of thing to discuss and lot of things to know in this episode. But before we get into the episode's content, I want to say thank you so much. Thank you so much for carving time out and deciding that I'm going to spend next few minutes with holistic happiness club with Akshay Tiwari. So thank you so much for your commitment of time. And special thanks to all those who decides to tune into holistic happiness club every single week. Actually, this is the time that you invest. This is the fuel for us. This is the motivation for us to go, to keep going every single week and keep producing something more and more meaningful every single week. So thank you so much for your time. Thank you so much for your commitment. Please keep supporting us the way you have always been supporting us. Thank you so much. And without further delay, let's dive into the topic. Hi, my name is Akshay Tiwari. I am a holistic happiness coach, author of the book named Ashar, and the founder of Holistic Happiness Club. Holistic Happiness Club is a place where we talk about happiness holistically. We understand that happiness is not a single faceted thing. It is a multifaceted thing. Everything that is there in our life, everything that touches our life, is a part of our happiness. And that is why happiness needs to be looked at, looked from a 360 degree perspective, from a multiple different perspective. And that's why in Holistic Happiness Club, we talk about everything. We talk about health, we talk about your positive psychology thing, and we talk about your relationship, wealth, etc. Etc. Etcetera. More about me, more about Holistic Happiness club at the end of the episode, but for now, stay tuned and enjoy the episode. Alright, so let's begin with the topic of the day. So the first thing that we need to do in order to integrate our daily life and spirituality is to identify your own self. Now, it might sound very naive, but a lot of people, lot of us do not even know our own selves very well. So what do I mean by identifying your own selves? So, first thing that is that you need to know what are your highest values? What are your highest motivators. For some people, it might be honesty. For some people it might be making a difference. For some people it might be family. For some people it might be integrity. For some people it might be serving other people. For some people it might be gratitude on, etc. Etc. Etcetera. There are so many values that you might be resonating with. I'm not saying that there are not. There are. There are other values that you do not resonate. But. But the thing is that there are few values that are on top of your priority list. You need to identify those values. How you are going to identify. You need to look at your own life in the past. And you need to see when there were high times, when there were good times, and when there were low times, when there were not so good times. That time, what were the values that were being expressed? And that what were the values that were not being expressed. And that is how you will slowly get to know what are your highest values. In addition to that, you can explore your talents, what are your unique gifts and how that unique gifts. How. How you can make a use of that unique gifts, aligning with your highest values and embrace your own authentic self. So this is what I mean by identifying your own self. You need to identify your own values and belief systems, right? So this is the first step. I will tell you how it integrate in your spirituality and integrating your daily life. Right. Second step that you need to take is understanding your dharma. Now, dharma is a sanskrit word and so many times, so many people translate it to translate it as religion. But Dharma is not about religion. Dharma is a vast, vast term. But if I want to simplify it, if I want to make a rough translation, that it will, then it will translate to duties. Okay. I talk about Dharma in more detail, in very comprehensive manner in my bootcamp. So if you are interested, then you can inquire me about the bootcamps when it is going to happen. You can make a registration for that. Anyways. So Dharma, very roughly, can be translated as duties. So you need to discover your own duties. What I mean by discovering, discovering your own duties. So as a person, you play very, very different roles at. In your life, in different times, in different places. All right? So you need to. So for example, 20 years back, I was a student. So as a student, my duty was to study. Now, 2020 years later, when I'm an employee, my duties as an employee are very different from student. From a student, right? So as time passes, my duty has my duties evolved. And because I play different roles, I am an employee as well. I am an employer as well. I am a son as well. I am a friend as well. I am a brother as well. So in different, different roles, my duties are different. We need to identify in which role, what are my duties. So they change time to time, role to role, and also from place to place, right. So when I go to office as an employee, my duties are different. When I come back home as a person, as a son, as a friend or someone else, my duties are different. So place to place, also the duties change. Right. Another example I can give from time to time, that duties change. As a father, in the early stage of your son or daughter, when your kids are very young, that time, your duty as a father is to take care of them, to provide for them. But as they grow older, you might want to strategically withdraw your control from their life so that they can make their own mistakes, they can explore their own world, and they can grow from there. Right? So as time changes, your duty as a father will also change. Right? So that is what I mean, that you need to discover your duty. What are your duties right now? And apart from playing different, different roles, we are also human, living on this earth. We are consuming the resources from Earth and we are taking a lot from society. So to take care of the society and take care of our mother Earth, that is also our duty. So we need to find out, in short, we need to find out our duties. And the second thing, that once we find out our duties, we need to look at how many of our duties are aligning with our values. If they are not, how can we do that? How can we align our actions, align our dharma with the highest values that we preserve? Because that is going to be individually different, of course, and also embrace this journey. Because this is a very delicate journey. It's very easy to say that you need to discover your duties and you need to align your actions with the values that you have. But it's a very complex journey. Sometimes your duties might seem to be conflicting, right? And so that time, you need to decide what, which one takes the priority and which one does not, which one has more importance in this particular time and which one does not. So you need to embrace this journey because it's a complex journey. There will be problems. There will. It is not. I'm not saying that it's going to be very easy. It is going to be simple, but it's not going to be very easy journey. So you need to embrace this journey of understanding the dharma and aligning your actions with your duties with your dharma and aligning your actions with your highest values, highest self, alright? So when you are operating at your best state, so at that time, assumption is that you will be performing all your duties in alignment with all the values that you have. All the highest values that you have, right? And the spirituality, the thing that spirituality does, these practices, these meditation, mindfulness, all these practices, they are supposed to keep us at our highest state, okay? So that we can perform our duties, so that we can align our actions with our highest values. All right? So some people might differ from me on this stage. They might say that the goal of spirituality is very different. It is moksha, it is nirvana, it's liberation and it is awakening. All right, I hear you, I hear you. But what I'm trying to say here is that not everyone, not every common folk is aware of these term. And not every common folk is aiming to get liberation and awakening and enlightenment. Not everyone is trying to be a buddha here. We are common folk. We are trying to live our common life. Now what we want is we want a fulfilled life so that in order to do that, we are embracing spirituality. So this becomes the starting point, right? This is, I'm not saying this is the entire spirituality, but common folks like us, this is a very good starting point. And I'm not saying that there can, there has to be a next step that you need to take next week or next year. If you can do this much, this much is going to be enough. And slowly it will take you to next step automatically. If you are doing these things in the right way, in the most honest way, then slowly it is going to take you to the next level automatically. You don't have to worry about it. So common folks like we can go on our daily, go on with our daily life, performing and understanding our duties and our highest values, aligning these two together. Okay? And I will talk a little bit more about how you can integrate these things with the spirituality in a minute. But before that, I have a very special request to all of you. So if you are listening this podcast on iTunes or Spotify, they have a special feature where you can rate this podcast up to five star. You can also leave the feedback. So I will request you that you can rate this podcast up to five star. And. And let me know the feedback that you have for this podcast. Let me know with what else you want to hear from me. Let me know if anything else that I can improve upon. I would. I would be very happy to hear all those things from you. And if you're listening this podcast on YouTube, please like this video, please subscribe to the channel and please share this content with other people to whom you think that this might be useful. Right? So this was the special request. Now let's go ahead for the next step, how we can integrate spirituality in our daily life. Now, the third step is, the first one was to identify yourself. And the second was. Second one was to understand your dharma. And aligning these two. And the third step is understanding your own philosophy of life. Now, when you understand your highest beliefs, highest values, then you need. And once you understand your dharma, you need to understand the philosophy of your life, how you want to live your life. Okay. For example, how you will understand your own philosophy. I mean, anything that resonates with you. There are multiple philosophy. You can learn from Vedanta, you can learn from Bhagavad Gita, you can learn from Bible. And you can learn from different spiritual teacher as well. Whatever resonates with you the most that you can pick as your philosophy of life. For example, for me, there are things that I believe too much into the divine. I believe too much into. Into a higher power that is taking care of all of us. So whenever there are things that are going according to my plan, I assume that God is working through me. Okay? And if things are not going according to my plan, then also I would say that God is having a better plan for me. And that is why he is preparing me for those better results. All right, so there is my philosophy. Not everybody needs to. Needs to be aligned with my philosophy. Likewise, you can develop your own philosophies. You can develop your own rules of life. You can do that. First, you need to understand your own values. Then you can examine your belief. Or you need to examine your ideas of how the world operates. Right? Whichever resonate with you, whichever spiritual teaching resonate with you, you can pick and try to embrace that philosophy in your day to day life. Try to cultivate meaning out of these daily activities, this philosophy, this highest value, this dharma, everything. And embrace life. Long journey. See, these things are very dynamic today. There will be one understanding. Tomorrow, if you listen to someone else, or if some event happens, your understanding might completely change. Or if not completely, at least 1% addition can be there for sure. So these things are very, very dynamic. So you need to embrace a lifelong journey. You need to continuously examine yourself. You need to have an open mindset that, okay, new philosophies can come. You don't have to force with everything in the philosophy that you already have. New philosophies can emerge from discussions, from events that are happening in the life and time to time, as our dharma changes, time to time, as our duties changes, things can take a turn. Alright? So you need to embrace this lifelong journey, this lifelong learning. Next thing is that you need to have some spiritual practices. So, as I said, these spiritual practices of meditation, mindfulness, these are designed to have to make us fulfilled also, at the same time, to help us operate in the highest state. Now, if we do not know what, what are our values, whatever, what are our dharma, what are our duties, what is our dharma? And we are not able to align our actions with our dharma and our highest values, then these practices might not be very much of use. And that is why the initial steps that I talked about are very important. So once those are, those things are in place, you need to also devise your own spiritual practice. So there are multiple things. Where there is meditation, there is mindfulness practices, there is gratitude, there is also connection with nature. It's a wonderful practices, wonderful practice, very underrated. That you go out in nature and try to connect with nature, try to feel the breeze, try to feel the green grass, trees, try to soak the sun, etcetera. Right? So this is, it's a very underrated practice, but it's a wonderful spiritual practice. Not only it has a spiritual benefit, it has mental health benefits. It has so many health, physical health benefits as well. All right, so you can choose your own spiritual practice, whichever you resonate with. Either it is meditation or it is gratitude, or it is mindfulness, or it is connection with nature. See, the point here is whichever practice you choose, it is not only for 15 minutes or 20 minutes or 30 minutes of practice. If you are practicing gratitude, it's good that you are writing a journal or you are maintaining a gratitude jar. But also try to be grateful at every step of the way. Try to be grateful at every hour of the day. If you are practicing mindfulness, try to be mindful. Try to do only one task at a time. And try to focus completely on that task whenever you are doing, don't be distracted with social media or other things like that. If you are practicing connection with nature, it's not only 115 minutes of a stroll that you take in the nature on the nearby park, but. But also whenever you are doing anything in the day, suppose you are writing something on the paper. So everything that we are consuming, it is coming from nature, right? Somehow it is connected with nature. So make sure that you are not misusing things that are going to harm nature. So it is a practice that you adopt for the whole day, not just for 15 minutes. You need to see the elements of that practice in your entire day. And of course, when you practice that for 15 minutes, 20 minutes, 30 minutes, it will take you to the highest state possible for you in that, in those particular circumstances, so that you can do your dharma, your duties, in the best possible way, aligned with your values. All right? And you can also embrace the philosophy that you have for your life. All right? So now let's recap the whole thing. To integrate integrated spirituality with your daily life. Start your day right. Start your day in a good note. So in each morning, try to do some practice, whichever resonates with you. Some spiritual practice, mindful mindfulness, meditation, gratitude, or whatever you like. You can do that. And second thing is, or connecting with the mother nature that is also there. Second thing is that schedule a reflection time. See, this is very important. A lot of progress is going to happen here. A reflection time is a time. Maybe at the end of the day or in the beginning of the day, you can review the whole day that has been passed yesterday or the last day, and you see how you have acted or reacted in a particular situation. And ask yourself, if you were operating at your highest state, if you knew your highest values and you knew your duties and your dharma, what would you have done differently? So you. So let's say there has been one event and you acted and you did something. Let's say x. Now, when you are reflecting and you are asking yourself, if I was at my highest state, knowing all my values, knowing all my duties, what should I have been doing differently? That will align in the best possible way with my values, and that will align in the best possible way with my duties. So when you, when you will ask those question to you, you will get new insights of handling your day to day things. This is where the most of your progress is going to happen. This is where I have got most of my progress. Sometimes in the haste we do something or we react. We don't get time. But at least when we get time, we need to reflect back. And we need to ask ourselves, how can, how could I have done or how could I have handled that situation in a better way with the philosophy that I have? So let's say there has been something that is not very good and I got panicked at that time. And when that moment is passed, I am asking myself, because I believe in divine, because I believe in God and I believe that he is working for my best, my highest possible good. Should I have been panicked at that time? Because if it has not gone according to me, it is okay, it has gone according to God, right? It is. It is my philosophy. So was my reaction justified? According to my philosophy, maybe not, right? Maybe as a human it is justified. That's fine. But according to my philosophy, according to my values, according to my dharma, it was not justified. So I need to ask myself what could have been done in a better way? And next time I need to try to incorporate that better way in my life. This is where most of the progress is going to happen. Again, I'm reemphasizing that. So this is the way that you integrate spirituality into your daily routine. All right, so this was the end of the topic, how you integrate spirituality into your daily life. But before I end the episode, I want to announce that you can become a member of holistic Happiness club. This membership of holistic happiness Club is free. There are weekly events which are free to attend again and there are a lot of value that you get from those events, right? So I request to everyone that please become a member of holistic Happiness Club. To join that membership. To become a member of holistic Happiness Club, a link will be given in the description. Please click on that link, follow that link and you will become a member of Holistic Happiness Club. If you want to download a book ebook which I have written, the ebook is the happiness blueprint, practical strategies for a fulfilled life. It's a pocket size ebook full of practical and actionable steps that you can take right now and start changing your life right now. Right. If you want to download this book, the link to download this ebook will be given in the description. You can follow that link to download this ebook. Also, if you want to connect with me on a one to one basis, if you want to discuss all the roadblocks that you have for your success and happiness, and you want to devise your own happiness blueprint, the link will be given in the description. You can follow that link and you can book a one to one call with me. Also, if you want to connect with me on social media. Instagram is the place because I'm most active on Instagram. And with that, I remember that I have started a new 21 day challenge. If you want to follow my journey of 21 day challenge and if you want to join that challenge as well, because it's not that hard, you can also join so you can follow me on Instagram.@happinessarchitect is my Instagram handle. You can connect me, connect me with. Connect with me on Instagram there. And if you want to know more about me, you can check out my website. Akshaytiwari.in is my website. And with that, we have reached to the end of the episode. So by the time we are seeing each other again, till the time we are not meeting again, take care of yourself, take care of your loved one, and take care of the people around you. And always remember, happiness is a lifestyle.