How To Deepen Your Love For Life - A Powerful Exercise

https://youtu.be/mbkVw2Ppl98

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Hey, this is Leo for actualised.org. And in this video I want to talk about how to cultivate a deeper love for life What do you love about life? That's the basic, most essential question I have for you today. In this video, I want to take a deeper look at this. Life is a beautiful thing. And I don't know, if you are in touch with that. It's one thing to know this intellectually, it's another thing to actually be in touch with it. And you know what, I lose track of it myself, which is kind of what got me thinking along these lines, and led me to the idea of shooting this video is because, you know, life, this word life, let's think about that for a second. Actually, to me, the word life is, is kind of like a sacred word. Most people I get the sense of they use the word very, just like very mundane usage of the word like, Oh, my, this is my life. You know, this is life. We're living in life, life, love life, that it up. And I use that word myself like that sometimes. But to me, life is also very synonymous with, with the word reality. And I really love that word reality. To me, that's a really sacred word. And I feel like when people talk about reality, they don't talk about it nearly as often as, as life. But when they talk about reality, they also don't, don't take it with the same kind of seriousness and reverence that they should take it with. Because reality what is reality reality is this is, is the ultimate matrix that we're living in. Right? We're living in some sort of thing. And that is reality. It's also like, they're, they're really synonymous things. And it's like, it's amazing when you think about what this reality as a thing is. Because it's one thing to ask yourself, Oh, well, like it. What's, what's this object, a car? What's this object over there? It's a human being this object over there. It's a tree. And those can be very fascinating objects to study. But perhaps the most fascinating object of all is just the matrix of all the objects or the collection of all the objects, which is reality, and life to right, because it's just this like very wonderous, magical, mysterious, grandiose, complex, just mind blowing, baffling thing. And I think that sometimes we have these moments in our lives when we're very connected to that. That's when we feel spiritual. When people talk about spirituality, by the way, I think that's what a lot of the mean, is this connection to this kind of eternal truth. It's not, it's nothing religious, it's just this connection to this idea that, wow, it's like, it's, it's amazing. And you get that sense when you're looking at a beautiful sunset. Or if you go to the Grand Canyon, or you're out in nature somewhere, or you have some other kind of like peak experience in life, you feel very connected to reality, you feel like you're a kind of one with it, you're part of it, you also feel like it's very beautiful, and that it doesn't need to be changed in any way. See, a lot of us we spend a lot of our time in our life, calling around trying to change life trying to change reality on I'm certainly guilty of that myself. So but you gotta you gotta watch yourself on that. Make sure that you're not going overboard with that kind of stuff. Because especially as high achiever types, and people who love self improvement, and self actualization, you know, we want to go out there, we want to change the world. But sometimes we forget that the world is pretty good the way it is. Maybe it's just like, it's actually pretty marvelous and amazing exactly the way that it is. And it's easy to forget that stuff. So what I have here for you today is just a very simple exercise. In this exercise goes like this, I want you to sit down right now, in the middle, that's when you're gonna pause this video, and you're gonna ask yourself this question, I'm gonna pull out a piece of paper and you're gonna jot down 10 items for this list. Here's the question, what are the top 10 things that I love the most about life? So go ahead and pull out a piece of paper right now, pen or pencil, write this at the top of your sheet. What do I love the most about life? What are the top 10 things and you're gonna pause this video and you're going to generate the items. It might take you 1015 20 minutes to do this, however long, that's fine. Then come back and you'll click the play button, and we're going to discuss your results. We're going to also discuss what you can do with these results. Because this can be very revealing to do this exercise. If you've done a gratitude exercise before, I think that this exercise is a little bit different than regular gratitude exercises, because I'm not asking you here. What are you grateful for? I'm asking What do you love the most about life? Now, be careful, as you're answering this, that you're not answering for somebody else. And you're not answering for your family or for the way that you were raised, or for your religious group that you're a part of, or for your school are for your boss or for your company, or for anybody else. But just for yourself. It's difficult to separate the two sometimes what's your self? And what's all the social conditioning that you've been fed for your entire life? It's hard to separate those two sometimes. The reason this is different from gratitude is that when when you ask someone, what are they grateful for? Usually what they tell you stuff like, oh, well, I'm grateful for my parents. I'm grateful for my nice childhood. I'm grateful for the house that I live in. And I'm grateful for my health. Well, like this kind of stuff. No, that's good. Gratitude can be a good exercise to do, and I'll shoot videos on that. But here, it's different. It's like, what do you really love about life? What do you love about it? What are the top five or 10 things? Okay, so pause the video now go ahead answer. And then when you come back, I'm going to share my list with you. And also some insights. Alright, so go. Alright, so I hope you did that exercise. If you didn't, go ahead, stop and do it. By the way, doing these kinds of exercises. This is how practical personal development is done. This is how just sitting on your ass and watching videos all day, that's not going to be enough to get you the results that you want. If you're serious about self actualizing, you got to start to get active, doing exercises, reading books, and when you're reading a book, do an exercise. They tell you they're going out there practicing this stuff. These exercises, they seem simple. This seems sometimes like, Oh, I know the answers, I know what I would write down and then you just don't write anything down? Well, actually, you don't know. It just did this exercise on myself recently. And I was surprised with the list that I came up with. So speaking of which, here's the list. And I mean, I wasn't totally surprised. I mean, I basically do this stuff. I'm pretty self aware guy. And I've done a lot of very deliberate, self aware type of exercises over the last couple of years to help to bring that up from my subconscious into my conscious awareness. But even still, putting it in a way that you articulate it into words is important. Sometimes you have revelations as you do this. So here's my list. And you can compare it with your list. But I want you to do your exercise first. So that my list doesn't cloud your judgment. And it doesn't, you know, give you like biases and different basically skews your results. So make sure that you do the exercise before you listen to my list. Here's my list. I think one of the things I really appreciate and love about life so much is color and vision. Like I love interacting with life through color. Like it's just amazing, like what is vision and how it works. And perception. To me, that's amazing. And this also goes into appreciation of art. I love art history. Also appreciation of graphic design. I did a lot of logo design in the past. I'm a pretty good web, front end developer. And I can do lots of lots of graphic design on that front. So I've done a lot of front end graphics and user interface designs. So I love that stuff. I love looking at that stuff. To me that's just very satisfying, right? It's very satisfying as it's like very mysterious to like what are these things called colors? Where do they come from? Another thing that I really love is thinking concepts and understanding reality. To me, one of the ways, one of the most profound ways that I interact with reality, besides my visual sense senses, which I love is with my mind, with my ability to analyze to look to see how things interconnect. I love drawing connections between different ideas and, and subjects and concepts. That's why it's part of the reason why I started actualize that org is because I love connecting the dots between stuff. To me that's really interesting. It's fascinating. And it's also it's like it's like spiritual work doing this kind of stuff for me. Because when I can connect one idea over here with one idea over here, to me, it's almost as though like I'm I'm discovering reality, and to me, that's amazing, because what else is there but reality right? Reality is the ultimate thing. And here I am. understanding it. That's like that's amazing to me, that's sacred to me. So a lot of my my love for life comes from that. Another thing on my list is the love of doing work and then accomplishing something through effort. I love that. I love that sense when I work really hard towards Something that I'm able to succeed at it. And I don't always succeed, a lot of times I fail. But those moments when I do succeed, when I kill it in the gym, when I go out there, and you know, maybe I read a couple of amazing books, or I clean up my diet, or I do something, make a really great video, or do some other kind of creative type of activity like that I produce something into me that pride and satisfaction from having produced, it's almost almost like giving birth. It's also like a sacred thing, you know, I get to give birth to all these different ideas and things. Like that's a cool thing. For me, I get a lot of kicks from that. I don't think that I love is planning for the future. I love sitting down and organizing my notes, having big plans for the future that's really inspiring to me. I love also being connected with reality. I don't know if you ever get this feeling of like contemplation where you're like this kind of contemplative mood. A lot of times I get this when I'm in the car, and I'm driving somewhere a long road trip. And I love driving somewhere just by myself for hours, like no one to talk to, no emails, nothing just like me, the empty road, maybe it's even dark out. So it's nighttime, just like no distractions, I got a little bit of music playing. And I'm just like in this very contemplative mood. And I'm kind of like thinking about larger things, you know, I'm thinking about the big picture of my life, or I'm thinking about my past, or I'm kind of just like, reflecting on recollecting, or maybe I'm, again, drawing connections between ideas. But when I'm in that kind of mood, very contemplative, very kind of solid mood. I love that. That feeling to me is one of the greatest feelings in life. I love being productive and creative. So we also I just mentioned, the thing about being proud of my work. To me, that's a little bit different. So you know, I love being proud of my work. But then I also love being productive throughout my whole day, like getting a lot of stuff done. I also love being creative. So whenever there's like a something that needs to be put together, or constructed in some way, I love that too. I love that I get to be creative in life. Another one that I love is sex. Sex is amazing to me, I love it. I think that I enjoy sex a lot more than some other people do. At least guys, I don't think guys enjoy sex as much as I do. Not that I watch a lot of guys having sex, but just from the way that I talk to my friends and I kind of get their opinions on sex. It feels like it's very different. It's not as rich for them. It feels so much richer to me, I love that. I love making a girl come over and over again. Like to me that's amazing. I love that like deep connection and sex, love coming inside of a girl. Like it's so amazing. It's the most amazing feeling. I love deep intellectual conversations. And I don't have that many of them. Because I don't find people who I can have really deep connections with that often. And part of that is my anti social nature. So I think that I could be better at that, or something I can work on is finding those types of people. But when I find someone that I can have a really nice, like deep nuanced conversation with about life or about something like that. Yeah, that to me is really satisfying. I love that. I also love efficiency and organization. I love organizing stuff, I love finding tools and working on my workflow to make everything my life more efficient. I also love self improvement. So anything that I can do to make myself better and to grow myself, again, that's kind of like efficiency applied to my person to my body, into my mind. And then another thing that I love is just, I love the feeling of being warm and cozy. Like, to me that's something that I love about life is that, you know, maybe I can be lying in a bed real comfortable or lying on my couch with a blanket, or cuddling with someone like being very close. Like, to me, that feeling of warmth in the body. Like that's really satisfying. So I love that about life. So those are my 10 things. What are yours? You can compare them with my list? Maybe some of these rang some bells for you. And you maybe you're like, Oh yeah, I love that too. But don't let me dissuade you from your own original unique things that you love about life. Right? Maybe I gave you some genuine and honest reminders of the things you forgot. But maybe you have other things that I didn't mention on my list. And that's totally fine. Everyone's list should be fairly unique. So now that you've got this, what do you do with it? Well, here's a couple of questions that you can ask yourself to get even more value out of this list. Just by writing this stuff down. You should have already felt a little bit more connected to life into reality into your higher self. Already, you should have felt that and already maybe some little insights and epiphanies came out for you. But here's something I will bring out a few more. I want you to ask yourself the following question. Look at this list. Sit down and look at it. And then ask yourself how much of my time is going towards e Each one of these 10 things in my life on a regular basis. So for example, let's say that one of your items was to, I don't know, understand reality and thinking about concepts. Let's say that was one of your items. That's one of my items. Well, how much time in a week? How many hours and minutes? Do you spend doing that? What kind of activities are you doing? Is it a lot? Or is it a little? Are you spending five hours a week, 10 hours a week, or only 30 minutes a week, go down the whole list and just take a look and be honest with yourself about how much time you're investing in each one of these areas? On a regular basis? Then the next question, I want you to ask yourself looking at this list? How aligned is my career? And my current job with these items? Is the job in the work that I'm currently doing? The eight hours a day that I'm putting into my job, is that aligned with at least three of these items on this list at least three? Or is is it only aligned with one, or maybe it's not aligned with any of them at all? It's gonna be tough to admit. And for most of you, I'm willing to bet that if you're lucky, you're gonna have one item on this list aligned with your career. For most of you, it'll actually probably be zero, which is a big problem right there. That's why I'm so passionate about life purpose. And I've got other videos that talk about life purpose. But I want you to start to become more aware of just how much alignment or misalignment there is, between your work and the stuff that you love the most about life? Because if there's a huge gulf there, I mean, man, how, how are you going to become happy? How are you going to become successful, you can't become happy, because all the stuff that makes you happy, we just put it on the list. And by definition, now, your job is not there, because you say it's not so huge misalignment. Also, if you're justifying to yourself that Well, that's because I'm doing this job, and it's getting the money and success. It's getting you some money, and it's getting you some success. But I'm willing to bet if we aligned you with the stuff that you actually love doing, you'd have much more long term success, maybe not short term, successful long term success. Because that's where your passion comes from your passion comes from this list. If you're doing anything outside of this list, you got to really seriously consider cutting that stuff. I mean, why life is short as it is do the stuff that's on this list here. Speaking of which, ask yourself the next question, How about my hobbies? And my relationships? How well aligned? Are those with the items on this list? Is there a correlation, or are all my relationships and all my hobbies somehow different from the subs on this list? If it is, then that's stuff you got to change in your life. Any misalignments you're seeing here, that's all stuff you got to change. This isn't gonna change in one day, not in a week, it might take you a couple of years. But in order to get that process going, I find you have to be honest with yourself. And I see that a lot of people aren't honest with themselves. It was really hard for me to, to realize some of these misalignments five years ago, I recognized some huge misalignments. And, you know, it was tough to admit those. And I had to go and work a lot worked for years and months, and put in a lot of labor and money and everything to get these alignments. But now I've got a lot of stuff aligned, not perfectly, but I got a lot of stuff aligned, because I've been working on it real hard. And my life feels so much better. Now this alignment has taken place. So I'm really big on this idea of alignment. And finally, what I want you to do at the end of this video, I want you to sit down next to each item on this list, one through 10, I want you to ask yourself up each item one by one the following question. How can I honor this activity more in my life? So for example, for me, thinking about concepts and understanding reality better. That's something that's really important. I love that. How can I honor that more? Well, one of the things lately that I know I should be doing, but I've been slacking off on I should be journaling more, I should be jotting down my thoughts, my notes more, because to me, that feels really good. It helps me clarify things on paper in a way that I can in my own mind, it helps me draw these connections. It also helps me to deliver more content to you to shoot these videos because when I write that stuff down, it doesn't get lost. I can then come and discuss it here more easily. So for me like that would be one action item is just journaling more consistently developing a habit of that. If, for example, one of your items on your list was to to love color and vision the way that I do and that's one of my items. And one thing that I could do there is you know, I don't spend And nearly enough time appreciating art, I don't spend nearly enough time really studying graphics the way that I used to in the past. And that's something that gave me a lot of satisfaction. So one of the things that I've been wanting to do lately is there's this game on on the iPad that I wanted to play that's got like these very amazing visuals on it. And so I've been holding off getting that because I don't have an iPad anymore, I sold my old iPad. And so now, I can't play that game. But I was thinking like, I should really probably go out there to get a new iPad and play this game, just because to me, it's like looking at those visuals that might give me some like interesting ideas like that satisfies me on a creative level, in a way that few other things do. So to me that's like an inspiration, a source of inspiration and creativity in my life is, is looking at beautiful graphics or art. So that's what I want you to do is I want you to come up with ideas like this. And they don't have to be massive, right. So this doesn't mean that if you have some item on the list, now you have to go climb Mount Everest, you don't need to do that. In fact, it's better if you start small, start with a couple of little very practical things, maybe you could do it right now, at the end of this video, just some little change you could make to honor each one of these a little bit more in your life. And then of course, after you finish making that list, then you gotta strive to go out there and actually do it. Alright, so this is it. This is how to love your life a little bit more, I think this is this kind of activity you should be doing on a quarterly or at least an annual basis so that you're reconnecting, because it's so easy to get lost nowadays, in the mundaneness of life. All right, I'm signing off, go ahead, post your comments down below. I'd love to hear what you think. Leave me a like click the Like button. If you liked it, post it on Facebook, share it with your friends so that this message spreads around, then I can release more free content in the future. 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