Why Bad Habits can Deplete your Vitality and Four Ways to Increase It [Episode #703]

Today’s solocast topic is: Why Bad Habits can Deplete your Vitality and Four Ways to Increase It

When it comes to vitality, as we’ll get into in our show today, it really is more expansive than thinking about one aspect of health. It’s more than what our weight is and what we look like. It’s more than energy. It is our total life force. And when we have more vitality, we are more focused, powerful, creative, healthy, resilient and glowing.

All of these somewhat intangible aspects that can feel like, what is that about that person? What is that quality? You may be thinking about vitality, which we could also say is radiance. And we’ll get into our show today on how to not take it for granted, not deplete it, not leak it out in ways that we may be unconscious about, but also sustain it, boost it and nurture it.

Topics Covered In Why Bad Habits can Deplete your Vitality and Four Ways to Increase It

#1. Meditations for vitality

#2 Boost vitality through calmness and stillness

#3. “Digesting” your feelings 

#4. Using your will for worthy pursuits

#5. 4 things that are depleting your vitality

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Transcript:

Note: The following is the output of transcribing from an audio recording. Although the transcription is largely accurate, in some cases it is incomplete or inaccurate. This is due to inaudible passages or transcription errors. It is posted as an aid, but should not be treated as an authoritative record.

Namaste loves and welcome back to our Monday solocast podcast, where I am very excited to share about our topic today, which is 4 Things that are Depleting Your Vitality and 4 Ways to Boost It. And when it comes to vitality, as we’ll get into in our show today, it really is more expansive than thinking about one aspect of health. It’s more than what our weight is. It’s more than what we look like. It’s more than energy. It is our total life force. And when we have more vitality, we are more focused and powerful and creative and healthy and resilient and glowing and all these somewhat intangible aspects that can feel like, what is that about that person? What is that quality? And so you may really be thinking about vitality, which we could also say is radiance. And so we’ll get into our show today.

How to, again, not just take it for granted, not deplete it, not leak it out in ways that we may be unconscious about, but also sustain it and boost it and nurture it. It’s like this, um, fire that we really wanna take care of and tend to date in and day out. So I love this topic. I love the whole concept of vitality, which is central in yoga and Ayurvedic medicine. And so I love to share about this. This is also a part of the new book. There’s a couple, uh, chapters where I go into this. So the first one is called. You are a powerhouse. I have this in front of me now. Um, and this is chapter 12 and chapter 13 with actual practices. So remember for going much deeper in these teachings and ways in which you can live your most, truly successful, not just on paper, but feeling fulfilled and whole and loved and loving and peaceful in your life.

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Truly hope with my whole heart that you have, it’s just wonderful to support. And it helps other amazing souls like yourself find this information that can really hopefully help other people as well. And along those lines, you can also make an effort to share a, a particular show, an interview that you liked, or just the show in general with, with someone you think would benefit. And that’s part of what the sole quality and the Geeta, the, the charity aspect, which is the expansion aspect, which is really where, um, we do. We start to dissolve the delusion of personal ownership and what this means is the more we tap into the fact that we are one, we are all interconnected. There is this larger collective. We wanna help each other as much as we can. We wanna support. So please take a screenshot or share a link with loved ones, friends, colleagues, anyone you think would benefit, and please pass the show along.

Solocast: 4 Things that are Depleting Your Vitality and 4 Ways to Boost It

So thank you again for all of this for being part of the community for our announcements. And now let’s dive right into our show today. I’m very excited to talk about this whole concept of vitality. So this is something that I’ve been really pondering deeply over the last few years, when I started my journey to wanting to feel better, I probably wouldn’t have used the word vitality. I would’ve used the word health, you know, then it started becoming this, you know, wellness word was a big buzzword. And then it was a little bit fuzzy for a while. Like I think it is for a lot of us. How do I define that? What does that mean? Is it just based on numbers? Like how much I weigh does that mean I’m really healthy? And then I start going deeper and deeper into ancient teachings and especially the bug of Aita, which I talk about to you so much, because it has had such a deep, huge impact on my life.

And since last January I read it, I read the commentary, Yogananda, which is very, you know, too thick, long texts. And then I read it again and again, and every time I read it, I, I glean more wisdom. I get a lot more out of it. And so in the Gita, there’s a lot in Yoon is commentary. There’s a lot about vitality and what it means to have our fullness of vitality. So Vita means life. So vitality in the sense means that quality, as I mentioned of strong life force, and it also means radiance. So in yoga NA commentary, there’s this part where he talks about Taja, which is another word in Sri for fire or light. And so the more vitality we express through our individual energy, we are spirit individualized. We are each unique. The more we are able to reflect that purity of light coming out of us, the more radiant we are, the more magnetic we are, the more vitality that we have and that we exhibit.

So it is very attractive. It is very magnetic. It draws people to us. It’s that quality like I say, or you’re just like, what is that about that person? And sometimes we use the word glow. Sometimes we say, oh, there’s just something really, you know, effervescent about that person. But radiance and vitality are something that we wanna approach as all things from our four cornerstone perspective. And that’s what I wanna get into today on our show, in this holistic way, in which we can look at how do we tend this light inside of us? How do we allow it to come forth in its purity, in its power? And how are we sure not to deplete it? So we wanna be sure that we’re looking at it from this holistic perspective, because everything is energy and everything is interconnected. So this is not gonna be about checking off a list of foods to get at the store.

This isn’t about certain, you know, just physical exercises or yoga Austin, those or poses that we can do. It is really the totality in which we approach our lifestyle. And so this is one of the reasons that the Geeta talks about meditation. It talks about our food choices because all these different aspects add up and really create the ways in which we exhibit this light. So I wanna focus today on this chart, which is on page 1 56 and the book, and really use this as the basis for our podcast today for our solo cast today. Because as I promised you, there’s four ways that you can really support. And there’s four ways that you can really deplete your vitality. And for more information, there’s a lot more to say about vitality. Again, please reference the new book. You are more than you think you are.

Let’s talk digestion when it comes to feeling and food perspective

So one of the things that I wanna talk about is this concept of digestion and so digestion from both a feeling perspective and a food perspective. So digestion means that we metabolize something and then we excrete it, or we let it go. And so when it comes to feelings, things may come into our consciousness. They come in and we feel them. We experience them, but we don’t want to hold on. We don’t want to make things harder than they need to be, which can create inflammation in the body and deplete our focus, our health and our light. So there is a balance with emotions and feelings. So one of the aspects, one of the things that boost vitality is digestion. And this also means food. I’ll just cover that quickly. We wanna make sure that we are eating food, that doesn’t stick for round too long in our GI tract.

That means avoiding heavily fried foods, foods that have a lot of omega six fatty acids, like all these vegetable oils that are in lots of junk food, heavy animal products, eating excessive animal products, and definitely dairy gluten, which can be sticky for many of us. And so we want things to come in and leave <laugh>. And the reason is because the natural vitality is something that isn’t, it isn’t something we need to acquire. It isn’t something that we need to get. It’s rather something that we nurture and bring forth from inside of us. So the more things that dampen, the more things that weigh us down, like difficult to digest foods and things we hold onto the more our fire and our light gets depleted. So we wanna notice feelings and experiences, and then we want to metabolize them, lean into them, feel them, and then let them go.

So digestion becomes a very important way to boost and support our vitality. On the other hand, though, so I’m gonna flip back and forth a little bit today in our discussion, what depletes, vitality, and PR, or this life force that runs through every part of us, every cell, every aspect, and the space in us and around us is unrestrained emotions. So when we talk about feeling our feelings, there is a balance between noticing that something triggered our nervous system, and there’s something that’s rising up in us that we want to not push down. We don’t wanna suppress it, but at the same time, we wanna be aware. We wanna take our light to it. We wanna breathe. We wanna feel it. We wanna let it go. There’s a difference between that process, which is about promoting digestion and just giving in full unrestrained emotions. So letting our anger run rampant, going into rage, screaming out and jealousy, we need to balance feelings with mental strength and mental strength is where this part of our brain kicks in with logic and reason and says, you know, this is where we are as adults because young children don’t have this fully developed yet.

This is where we can say as adults, oh, this is something from the past. This is an old wound. This is a reaction. This isn’t really real. And so by not flying into these wild unrestrained emotions, we don’t deplete so much of this precious energy and vitality and life force. So it’s important. Sometimes we’re gonna fly off the handle a bit. We are going to have big feelings, but more and more, we wanna take our tools and practices with us.

4 ways to boost your vitality

#1. Meditations for vitality

We wanna start the day with meditation. So overall we become less reactive. We wanna be able to breathe. We wanna be able to take those sacred pauses <laugh> in between when something makes us feel a certain charge. And when we let something come out of our mouth and we comment or we speak, it’s really important that we, um, find more and more ways to create more of this mental strength as a way of living.

And so we need to decide what are, what, what are the energies that I wanna feel through my day? And if it’s peace and Equin, which are some of my goals, I don’t always reach them, of course, for human there’s emotions. But if that’s the goal, then we decide, oh, you know, I don’t wanna go too much into this. I don’t wanna raise my voice about this. I don’t wanna live like this. And so we just need to decide the energies that we wanna have in our life and manage emotions, cuz emotions come from feelings and thoughts and thoughts are not always correct. Dr. David Hawkins talks about thoughts being liars and being, you know, false. And he’s true. A lot of thoughts are just old reactions and wounds. So his mental strength comes in. And as I say this, I am looking at a picture of Shawn, me.

Sure. You Tua, who is the para guru, he’s Yoon guru. And he’s so dignified and he’s sitting up straight. And to me, he really exhibits this detachment from all the ups and downs of, of life. So right now he’s a real, um, you know, really taking on his energy. I focus him on him a lot in my meditations and my third eye. So we wanna really manage our emotions. And this is a huge way. You know, the stress of emotions can lead to a cascade effect of depleting inflammation in the body blood flow being pulled out of our GI tract, fatigue, exhaustion, autoimmune conditions so much can happen from our emotions. So this links to a key way to boost vitality, which is if we wanna keep our emotions in check, which is depleting, and we wanna digest

Our feelings more easily. This happens from having our inner anchor. So as we’ve talked about before, meditation is a key practical daily practice that I recommend every day. Think about brushing your teeth every day as something that you just hopefully got used to doing when you are child. And so you don’t really question it, it just becomes so ingrained in your daily rhythm and routine. And the same is true for drinking hot water with lemon or sleeping on a certain side of the bed or eating at a certain chair at your dinner table, whatever it is, it just becomes part of your life. And so in the beginning, let’s say for the first 40 days or so, which is considered a sacred number in Ayurveda and many religions and, and, and paths and, and traditions, we put extra effort. So let’s say you really want to integrate meditation.

And for 40 days you could say, this is my integration period. And please check out our free guided meditations over at mysolluna.com or the app pick one that resonates or pick two, or switch it up per week, whatever you wanna do, there’s no right way, no wrong way. And just right after getting up, put it on, listen, they’re about seven minutes and just commit to it. And I promise you, if you meditate every morning, your life will change. It will strengthen you. And it will definitely boost your vitality. You will feel that anchor, you will feel that centeredness and it will benefit you greatly.

#2: Boost vitality through calmness and stillness

So this is linked to the second way in which we can really boost vitality. And that is through calmness and stillness. So when you think about you watch a child and when the child is thrashing around and having a temper tantrum and having a really rough day, many, many temper tantrums, perhaps they get exhausted and they cannot wait for that nap. Or maybe they complain about the nap, but the nap is very much needed and they completely collapse it’s because they have depleted so much energy. They’ve given off so much energy through, through that, um, anxiousness through that movement. And so the more calm we stay and the more still we stay, which means, which also includes commenting less judging, less pulling back our energy, seeing where we’re not really, we don’t really have to be involved. This in turn will really help to make sure that we are not wasting our energy.

It means that we keep our energy very much sustained more sustainable because it’s sort of like, um, you know, trying to think of another analogy like that, that stillness of a lake, which I also talk about in the book. It’s so calm. And so it’s not depleting anything and it’s, it’s not leaking anything. But imagine if there’s this big storm and the lake is just, just being swirled all around, then it starts being, um, the rivers and the rettes from that lake start flowing like crazy.

#3: “Digesting” your feelings

So everything just starts leaking out. So the more meditation really helps with this. Everything starts to go together. Meditation helps us to keep that calmness and that calmness and that stillness help us to better digest our feelings and our emotions and this calmness and this stillness allow us to even better digest our food because our energy is more centered.

#4: Using your will for worthy pursuits

And then the fourth practice to boost vitality is to use your will for worthy pursuits. And so this is part of purpose. What this means is we are, we are closely watching. We have awareness of where we’re putting our energy. So imagine where you sit down and you say, okay, I wanna start a new business plan, or I’m going to start a new website or whatever it is. And then you get down to your desk and suddenly you just start scrolling on TikTok and suddenly, oh, what was that skirt? I saw my friend wearing, you start doing a little bit of online shopping, and then you start answering texts. And then you’re like, oh yeah, you’re not gonna work on this plan. And you start working on the plan. And then, you know, you get into like a signal chain or WhatsApp or one of those group chains and you start going in there.

So there’s many things that are gonna take our energy and suddenly, you know, some of it may turn a bit, maybe you get a little dark, a little gossipy, a little bit negative. So it’s really important that we keep our will turned towards our purpose. And we use a little bit more strength with ourselves to say, I’m here to help people. I wanna expand. I wanna connect. I wanna share. And so these worthy pursuits, as Yogananda called them, they fuel us. They give us energy. They make us feel that light shining through us because suddenly we’re small. We’re bigger than the small little, little us the ego. Now we’re part of the tapping into the true self, which is connected to everything in all things in spirit. So it’s when the more we wanna help people and connect and share, it opens up this light more and more.

So we’re fueled. We feel purposeful. We move through our day. We’re not bored. We’re not just snacking. We don’t have all these food cravings as much because now our energy is harnessed to something beautiful and bigger than us and purposeful. So there’s a lot more, I have to say about purpose in the new book as well. There’s a chapter called you are a creator by I’ll leave it today for at this point, but just know that the more clear you become about your purpose and you channel your energy there each and every day, that will very much support your vitality. And you will feel a boost to your health, your energy you’ll feel more inspired to choose healthier foods. You will feel more energetic in your workouts, in your conversations. Everything will flow through you in a different capacity. So it’s important that we stay tuned to well, first of all, that we clarify and that we stay connected to it.

4 things that are depleting your vitality

Now let’s get over to the, to the flip side, the four things that deplete your vitality.

#1. Unrestrained emotions

So we already talked about unrestrained emotions. We don’t wanna fly off the handle. We don’t wanna just, you know, <laugh> let everything go and say, oh, I’m feeling this. No, there has to be some discernment. There has to be a way in which we are able to see and bring in logic and reason and, and see that, Hey, you know, I’m an adult, I’m not a child. I can, man. I can self-manage here. I can self sooth. And it doesn’t mean there may be not something that you need to, to work through internally. But when you take that to the ex outside world, when you take it externally, you wanna be, you wanna just be managing it to a degree because you know, the shouting and the drama just really, really depletes your vitality and it never feels good in the end.

#2. Too much idle time

So the second aspect, the second, second thing that can really deplete your vitality is too much idle time. So when we’re sitting around, we start to go more and more into this energetic quality known as Tamasic or slothfulness. We are meant to shine the lights in all of our unique ways. We are meant to move through the earth, meant to move through life, creating co-creating with spirit expressing the light of radiance. And so if we’re just sitting around and we’re watching YouTube all day, and we don’t really feel any purpose to our life, sitting around eating Cheetos and junk food, we start to decay. We start to actually regress, and this will also dim the light of our radiants and vitality. So this is also connected of course, to purpose. We wanna stay anchored to what it is that makes us feel expanded and just inspired to connect to others and to help the collective.

Now, this is something that is unique to you. It is something that I can’t tell you specifically what it is, but you will know you will feel, yes, that’s what I wanna do. That’s how I wanna help the planet. And it will feel so good. The more you lock into that and connect to that, and that will feel your whole life.

#3. Worrying and holding grudges

The next one is the third one, rather in depleting, your vitality is worrying and holding grudges. So this is more and more, more and more modern research has found a link with health and anxiety and worry because these energies which are created in the mind, usually from trauma of the past, which is then carried into anxiety about the future, it depletes the body, it imbalances hormones. It makes us feel exhausted. It has an effect on our kidneys and our adrenals. There’s just so many ways in which our physical body starts to age and break down because of worry and holding grudges.

So we wanna practice more and more letting go, which is a full focus of one of our Thursday Q&A upcoming. So I encourage you to check it out and to go deep into that show because that’s a beautiful, beautiful, and powerful life skill is worry. Learning to let go and letting go of worry. Holding grudges is like being bloated. It means we don’t wanna let go. We wanna keep that and hold it over. Somebody’s head. And it really affects us. So we wanna let energy through just like digesting feelings, just let it through. Don’t worry, stay anchored inside, trust the light, everything isn’t gonna go your way. Not, you know, no one has this perfect life. That’s free of challenges, but the more that we trust and open up to life, knowing that we will be okay, no matter what happens, we sustain our vitality because fear and worry are depleting.

#4. Overtalking

And then finally, number four, as I am wrapping up this solocast in a few minutes, it’s funny. The last one here is overtalking. So there’s the parts in the ancient texts where it talks about the power of the word. So there’s the light, there’s the auditory then that the word comes in the spoken word of God, of the universe echoing through. And so we are the ones granted this speech as humans. And so there’s right. Power in our words. And there’s a section in the new book where I talk about how to effectively use words to manifest and create and how to effectively do affirmations. But for the purposes of our podcast here, I will say that, you know, words can be overused. They can actually be abused. And so we wanna make sure that we are being respectful of words and not go into this unconscious over talking over speaking, just talking to fill the time because we’re uncomfortable being silent. We want to make sure that we are using words with discernment. When we really have something to say, and then a powerful way to see it’s all connected and boosting vitality is stillness and calmness, where we do not have to speak. Have you ever noticed when you’re around someone and you just love being around them, you get really comfortable like your partner or your child. You don’t have to talk. My older son will just be coloring next to me or playing with blocks and I’ll be reading and it just feels so good being together.

And so this idea of filling with words comes from lack in a way, a lack based thinking, like I always have to talk. I always have to say something and it’s not true. You don’t always have to talk. So start to notice where you can comment less where you don’t have to judge where you don’t have to interject your opinion. Sit back, preserve your energy. Talking and talking does use up a lot of energy. And of course, sometimes we wanna have conversations and connect, but sometimes we do not need to connect in that way. So it’s up to us to be discerning, of course, and to pay attention and to feel with our own intuition, which is another subject in the book. Another chapter it’s also interwoven. We will start to notice and discern, where am I needed here? And where am I not? So let’s sum all this up, supporting your inner powerhouse, your vitality that takes us the light, the radiance inside of you, so that you attract and you manifest and you co-create what you want in your life.

And you don’t feel exhausted all the time and depleted number one, you boost it with meditation. This all important practice of tuning inward. Number two, you work on staying calm and finding more stillness. So though the expanding, the gaps practice in the new book is a really great way to connect to the stillness that is actually between the inhales and the exhales. Number three, digest your feelings and your food. So we wanna choose food that is not too heavy. That digest a well and same thing with feelings. Notice them, you experience them. You don’t try to push them away or not feel them. You, you let them in and then you let them flow out. You don’t go into them too much. Number four, using your will for worthy pursuits. You wanna anchor your energy into things that are inspiring and will help others for your purpose using your unique gifts to help others.

And this will give you more energy and more light and more creative ideas and solutions. And then on the flip side are four things that deplete our vitality and our pro life force. Number one, unrestrained emotions. So don’t go, you know, off the handle. Don’t indulge in that anger and feel the grief, let it wash through you, but you don’t have to stay in pain and suffering, which comes a lot from thoughts. You don’t let the thoughts keep feeding and feeding you, let them in, and then you let it flow through number two, too much idle time. You wanna, you wanna create, so don’t let yourself fall into just lots of screen time and junk food. Get up, move around, go for a walk, reevaluate your goals, do something that inspires you. Try a new hobby, anything to get that inspiration going again, will help to sustain more light number three, worrying and holding grudges.

Keep us bloated, keep our energy down, dim the light. So work on letting go more and more. And number four over talking notice where you can pull back, notice where you don’t have to speak so much notice where you don’t have to comment and allow that to guide you and just conserving more of your vitality and more of your energy. So for more info, please head over to mysolluna.com, articles, meditations, other podcasts with guests and Q and as, and solo cast that I think that you would enjoy. And please, if you are into this, I cannot say enough from my heart. Please check out the new book where I can share a lot more about these beautiful teachings and the teachings of Guruji. Paramahansa Yogananda, who is my primary teacher and has given us the inspiration for true yoga and meditation and other practices. So it’s under 20 bucks. Now. I think it’s like $16 on Amazon and hopefully local book sellers as well. So check it out for yourself. Thank you. As always, I’m honored that we are connected and on the journey together, sending you lots of love, and I will see you Thursday for our next Q&A podcast Namaste.