“Spiritual Hygiene” is the practice of monitoring the balance between your mental health, physical health, and spiritual health by incorporating beneficial habits into your daily routine to help maintain this balance.
When we take the time to check in with our Spiritual Hygiene and notice something is off-balance, we are already beginning the re-balancing process by acknowledging the imbalance.
The next step is to identify the cause of the imbalance so you can take the steps necessary to correct the situation.
An imbalance in our physical body originates from an imbalance in our mental health or spiritual health that has manifested itself into a physical symptom. By not addressing the challenges to your spiritual or mental health, the symptoms can fester and grow into a physical reality.
One of my students recently asked me,
“When is a headache just a headache, and when is a broken rib, just an accident?”
My answer was, and is, “Never.”
Webster defines an accident as “a: an unforeseen and unplanned event or circumstance. b: lack of intention or necessity.”
Yet, deciding to take action or not take action still has the intention behind the decision.
If the definition of an accident is an unpredicted outcome by one or more parties involved, not that it was a random result of chaos, you could argue, there are no accidents, only outcomes that were unforeseeable by one or both of the parties involved.
Most people define an accident as the result of something being out of their control or some coincidence related to chaos.
But really, an accident is an outcome of a particular series of events not predicted by the parties involved, regardless of their intentions.
I believe in synchronicity, a term coined by the famous Swiss psychiatrist, Carl Jung, which states:
“…events are “meaningful coincidences” if they occur with no causal relationship yet seem to be meaningfully related.” -quote taken from Wikipedia
I also think there can be accidents. But at the same time, not because there was no intention, but because it was a series of events that led to an accident caused by free-will decisions.
A series of free-will decisions that lead to an unanticipated outcome does not remove the impact of other energetic influences that caused a person to make that free-will decision.
To put it simply:
Everything happens for a reason.
I know the above statement can feel or sound ambiguous, and often people disregard it for that reason, but we have intention behind everything we do. We just don’t always understand the true intention.
The last time you caught a minor cold that forced you to cancel some plans, was there anything you were not looking forward to about the plans? Or did something happen later that possibly kept you safe because you could not follow through with the plans?
To understand the true intention behind an act of free-will that resulted in an unpredicted effect, ask yourself if there is an advantage to the outcome.
Medical science studies what leads to physical disorders and has also become very involved in studying the way stress, or mental pressure can affect your physical health.
However, even when we are in good physical and mental health, if we do not feel genuinely aligned in our spiritual health, we can still find ourselves in an unbalanced state. Especially if we are ignoring what our heart wants because our mind is telling us we should be doing otherwise. (In my next blog, maybe we’ll discuss the word “should”)
Hearing your heart over your mind can be tricky. However, implementing practices to maintain good Spiritual Hygiene can give a louder voice to your heart so you can decipher the root causes of any imbalance more easily. Monitoring your Spiritual Hygiene will help you build intention towards the desired outcome instead of the “unforeseen” outcome.
Not every unintended outcome or accident is preventable by the injured party, but monitoring your spiritual hygiene can help you by:
1) Preventing Injury. Possibly preventing an unexpected outcome by being aware you are more prone to that undesirable outcome and taking care to avoid specific free-will actions that could lead to that outcome. (i.e., Knowing you tend to feel sleepy driving late at night, so choosing to stay off the roads at night.)
2) Minimizing Impact. If the undesired outcome occurs anyway, good spiritual hygiene can lessen the severity or impact of the outcome. (i.e., Not allowing resentment or anger towards yourself or others involved in the undesired outcome to build and cause more pain.)
3) Promote Healing and Recovery. Even when an undesirable outcome has occurred, good Spiritual Hygiene can promote and help to heal. (i.e., Pain management through meditation versus self-medicating with harmful substances.)
Examples of practicing good Spiritual Hygiene involve multiple forms of self-care, checking in with yourself through journaling, meditation, exercise, and eating fresh, organic foods.
For more information on one of these practices, check out a blog post a friend and colleague, Bonny Osterhage, wrote about how I use a technique I created called Whole Life Journaling to maintain good Spiritual Hygiene. You can read Bonny’s blog here.
Also, check out my YouTube channel for more videos on how I monitor my Spiritual Hygiene, as well as how to cultivate your intuition and other helpful spiritual practices.
