5 Best Ways to Enhance Spirituality in Daily Life: Practical Tips for Stress Relief

Are you under constant stress? Want to find an effective way out of it? Ever wondered how spirituality can be baked into being less stressed?

In our lives, we find ourselves constantly bombarded by stress. Whether it’s the timer for the beef in the oven, your rent that is due next month, what you’re going to wear for that posh party or trying to find a day to shut off and have it to yourself. 

The points above are random yes, but they all have an underlying theme which is a constant dull stress. This kind of stress isn’t like the hunt, where you track the target, hunt and kill it then go on with your day.

This kind of stress is an undercurrent that will continue to get worse until you begin to manage it properly. We can go years without noticing anything is wrong, though one day it will come to a head and break you down. 

It can be in the form of a midlife crisis, breakdown or grief, the list goes on here. And leaving it to get worse is not a viable option, when the damn breaks it could take months or years to recover from.

In this article you’ll find the best ways to manage the stream of stress. Also, it’s not easy to face this current, it’s a mirror, but God doesn’t give His best soldiers His easiest tasks.

Keep that in mind, you got this.

Top five ways to become more spiritually in tune.

Meditation

It’s likely you expected this as the top way to become more in tune with yourself, with good reason too. Meditation is a practice that dates back centuries and from almost every ancient culture in the world, the most prolific being Buddhism, Hinduism and Taoism. There are western recounts too, the most obvious being when Odin sacrifices himself to himself for 9 days and nights. 

Here’s an interesting post by Sorn on it, https://www.secretsofthenorse.com/norse-myths/odins-sacrifice-star-myth-part1 .

This is to say that it’s quite possible your ancestors were practising some form of meditation. To retrieve the runes, Odin has to go through many days of silence and contemplation to retrieve them. 

In a similar way, Buddha does this too before he becomes enlightened. To master yourself, you have to know yourself. What better way than to become silent and look into the deep lake that is yourself.

If spiritual history isn’t your thing, there are many scientific benefits to meditating too. To name a few,  it can decrease depression, anxiety, and burnout. Increases attention, innovation, improves sleep etc. If you’d like to find out more, check this link https://positivepsychology.com/benefits-of-meditation .

Meditation allows you to understand yourself on a more intimate level. Allowing you to find what you do and don’t like doing, catching yourself when you lie to yourself and overall becoming more grounded. 

A quiet mind is a strong mind.

Gratitude

Gratitude is a powerful form of self love in an indirect way. By practising it, you send out the signal that you are aware of what you have got. Focusing on what you have, you set your mind into abundance mode, allowing room for more in your life. 

I’ll write a post on this in the future to explain, but very quickly, what you think & feel are transmitted outwards to other people and God. As a reaction, you’ll often get the same energy back to you.

Not only this, it increases your relationship to those around you and yourself. By placing awareness of what you love about others, is what you’ll subconsciously search for in them. Over time, the interactions between people will become more positive and more meaningful connections will be made.

You develop a quiet confidence in yourself that others pick up on. Similar to what you transmit is what you receive, when you know what you’re happy for, it rubs off on every interaction.

Think back to that one happy soul you know. They always seem to be beaming, happy to be alive, to work, to connect and meet. Now think about how you feel towards them?

If there is anything negative, try changing that. Focus on their best traits. Be inspired by them rather than envious (if that’s how you feel). I can guarantee if you switch this frame, you’ll start growing your own unique energy. 

Exercise

Maybe a not so obvious one, but equally as important. With the added bonus of being the easiest to get into. As the old hermetic saying goes, “As above, so below”, your mind and body act in this way. 

To start having clearer thoughts and mind, you must take care of your physical body. Mind and body have a deep connection, it’s the reason once you finish a workout you feel alive and happy. 

On the surface level, you release hormones that make you feel better. You get stagnant energy out of muscles, blood pumping around the body and generally release stress. A less obvious way, by moving as humans are supposed to do, you fulfil an primal itch to do something physical, which your brain loves.

By releasing tension in the body and toxic cells, your mind also is forced to do the same, in terms of energy. Many truly happy people you meet are fit. It is a reflection of themselves, they have nothing to hide. You also know by looking at them that they say what they mean and do what they say. 

The above may sound silly, but cutting through the core, humans are designed to move. With this in mind, you can see why a body that moves will have a mind that works with more clarity. 

Find something you love and run with it (Pun intended).

Mental Diet

A very large component in increasing your spiritual connection. Your brain’s diet is most important. By feeding it the wrong imagery, you’ll find a brain that lacks drive and passion. Overrun with images, beliefs and concepts that don’t mesh up to the reality you want.

The brain is like a sponge, it is always looking for new information to gather and analyse. It will replicate whatever you feed it, and to make matters worse, your subconscious is always on. It’s very impressionable and doesn’t know the difference between reality and unreality.

This means, you could have a thought that isn’t your own, say you won’t be successful, and your subconscious takes this and stores it in the “unsuccessful” box. 

However, your conscious analytical mind is there as a barrier. When you can turn it on, it will keep all unwanted imagery out. But! There are ways to bypass this. Images and words together are the most effective at this, the faster and more repetitive the better. 

Think about the television, social media like youtube and tik tok. Videos use catchy music, images and someone talking to overwhelm your analytical brain. And as a result it moves on in. Before you know it, you find yourself thinking about drugs, guns, video games or scantily clad women. 

This is called programming. The good news is, you can take control of your feed. 

Unfollow any negative, unhelpful media. And find things that you love, here is an example of my pinterest feed:

You can see some cars, references for sketching and fashion. These things are either what I want in the future or hobbies that progress the expression of myself. Note: I refreshed my page once without trying to find a better example.

Feed your brain with what you want to work for, are interested in and inspire you. Take control of your mental diet and flow the energy in a direction you want. 

Reviewing and planning your days 

Finally, being intentional with your days is an unexpected point to make. But with all things intentional, you are programming yourself to be a doer. Not only this, it adds more clarity to your day. Which is the biggest reason to plan & review days.

Clarity is being able to see the forest for the trees, so to speak. It’s a clearness of mind and vision, a bigger picture of the whole. And with clarity you’re able to make better decisions towards your goals. 

You write how your day went, how it could’ve gone better and exactly what habits got you closer to your North star. This enables you to be grateful for your choices but more importantly why you made them. It will also let you tick off on a page what you’ve done, which is now out of your mind and in physical reality.

Further to this, if you don’t do what you said the day prior, knowing the actions will get you closer to your goal, means if you don’t do them. You fail yourself. 

Let me tell you, the worst thing you can do is fail yourself. Your divine duty is to look after you first, and if you have a goal in mind that drives you. Then the question arises why YOU wont work towards it. 

This sparks all manner of introspection and allows the mind to focus on what is important, bringing more of that into your life. 

Conclusion 

I hope that the list above has helped you in some way. My goal with these is to have actionable steps that can be easily achieved whilst having a low barrier to entry. 

The habits above, also play into each other too. When you start mediation, there may be moments you receive intelligent thoughts or suggestions. This will lead to journaling or planning your days. Which would lead nicely into being grateful that you received the thought when you needed it.

Spirituality is a cyclical rhythm of complexity. You can never know 100% how far you are or if an idea is intelligent or not. 

By doing the exercises mentioned above and others that you prefer which aren’t here, will shorten the time between getting intelligent suggestions and understanding what they mean. It reduces the lag and increases your self awareness too.

So, I really hope you learned something here and will implement one or more of these activities. If you found it helpful, please do share this article and let me know your thoughts in the comments below.

Also check out my previous article here:

Have a blessed day,

Elliott.