I remember sitting on my bunkbed in 4th grade, texting my best friends that all I want to be when I grow up is happy. I don’t care what job I have, where I live; I just want to FEEL happy with myself and this experience we call life.
Sometimes that pure innocence from childhood gets lost during our journey of life, or some say, “the real world”. I say shit happens. Either learn the lesson and grow, or repeat it until you do; your choice either way.
We don’t always appreciate the moments when we have it easy, until we have it harder.
Ever since COVID-19 hit, bringing us restrictions on our social & professional lives and expansion of our personal lives, the universe has been backhanding me valuable life lessons left and right. I finally had the time I never had working a regular 9-5 job to work on myself, for once.
I had time to dissect what’s actually serving me, and what’s most definitely not. A huge download I received was to pursue a higher version of my ‘already’ conscious lifestyle. (The great part of living a spiritual/conscious lifestyle is that you know and accept that there is always room to grow, expand, and enhance your knowledge and skills, in ALL areas of life.)
- What’s making me happy?
- What’s making me feel bored, heavy, tired, or annoyed?
- What’s giving me anxiety, or making me fearful, and how can I help this?
- What am I freaking doing with my life?
- Am I truly.. happy?
I am comfortable in my life, yet it’s not exactly where I wanted to be… The universe told me it’s time to uplevel my life, and to finally break the toxic patterns in my life.
So, I started to observe. The weeks went by and I started to log the patterns mentally.
I noticed that a ton of stress I was feeling from the collective at large, generational trauma, and life’s general BS was having me tend to unconsciously restrict my food intake. I was feeling super self conscious about what I was consuming, and what it actually was. It would get to points where I just felt like shit, and to be honest, I needed this. I needed to wake up to the reality I was living every day. I needed to hit a point where I couldn’t fucking take it anymore.
I noticed I was spending far too much time on social media, Youtube, and other .. well.. distractions.. to avoid what, though? Avoid facing my perfectionistic tendencies and conditioned childhood paradigms that kept me in a box of never showing my light to the world? To escape putting in effort into my own dream, because something was telling me I’m not worth it? I needed to get irritated with myself, and face my laziness & procrastination head fucking on.
I felt unproductive, bored, and like I wasn’t really reaching my full potential. I was feeling like I was living the same day over and over again. At first, the Netflix marathons are awesome until you genuinely contemplate your life during the loading screens reflecting your avoidant reality back at you before the show comes back on. Again, what the fuck are we doing with our lives? Our 4th grade selves would be like WTF are you guys doing?!? You’re finally BIG, and ABLE to do what I always DREAMED of!
We needed this wake up call. If you’re here reading this, you probably have some shit you’d like to change too.
Maybe you noticed some similar patterns in your life playing out in your own way and are tired of your own shit. Or you’re just looking for some simple, conscious habits to up level your life. Either way, you’re in the right place.
I started doing little things everyday differently, and I started to feel a little differently, consistently.
What was different you ask? I started putting my SELF first. I started valuing my self care. I started to to value the work, effort, and intention I put into my work. I started to believe in my self and actually show up for me. (Something that’s been insanely foreign to me, yet a step in the right direction.)
I started to heal my body to heal my mind, and heal my mind to heal my body; & my soul says yes to both!
Here’s 7 Conscious Lifestyle Habits that’ll Up-Level Your Life (for the better!):
- Consuming Conscious Content
I can’t be the only one that’s constantly honestly on my phone during this time. There’s tons of stuff to do on it communicate with other people play games check on social media and do research and what not right? Well I noticed I was kind of going overboard with the distractions in my life and I was feeling really unproductive.
Something really small and really awesome that I did to start to feel a little bit more productive in my every day life is to download an app called Duolingo. I pay $12 a week for their premium plan and I have unlimited little games to play that teach me another language. And I guess in 34 hours of playing this game gives you as much education as a whole college semester would! Can’t complain about that, huh?
Originally, when I first started dating my fiancé I had zero intention of ever learning another language, but knew that his whole family is from Colombia and can’t really speak English that well. I put it on my vision board to be fluent in Espanol, and I’ve been trying to do the most I can in the app every day. Since I’m not in school anymore it does give me a nice feeling of getting my brain some exercise.
Trying to provide your mind with nourishing conscious content, a.k.a. even a blog like this, books, podcasts and more, really help keep your mind sharp and active. You want to be filling up your mind daily with as much consciously curated content as possible so if that means learning new things and expanding your mind, I say fucking go for it.
2. Protein Smoothie Every Morning
Like I said earlier my diet literally went to shit. I needed to do something, and I need to do some thing fast. Something that would give me the energy in the morning without any coffee and help me feel good. So, I invested in some protein powder. Originally I always went with the Vega brand. I really liked they’re all in one organic nutritional shake in the chocolate flavor, but it started to be a little bit pricier than I wanted for the amount of servings.
Lately I’ve been hooked on the Orgain organic plant-based protein powder in creamy chocolate fudge! Vanilla is also really good, I just prefer a choco taste! This protein powder has 150 cal 21g of protein, tons of iron, and other healthy carbohydrates that I need to start my day. Along with a scoop or two of this protein, I usually put in a whole banana, a bit of almond milk, and frozen fruit of any kind.
This has been my favorite and go to breakfast because it’s high-protein, nutritious, and it helps kind of clean out your body first thing in the morning, if ya know what I mean. It’s a great way to even add greens into your diet if you’re not into salads; you can also add a bunch of spinach or kale to the smoothies and you can’t even taste it. I have been feeling stronger and more present ever since I started incorporating more protein first thing in the morning.
3. Stretching / Yoga Poses
I’ve been getting back into the flow… If you know what I mean. My favorite thing to do early in the morning, especially lately with our new backyard, has been to wake up around sunrise, which here in Arizona it’s probably about 5 or 6 AM. I love to bring my yoga mat out onto the patio and just do the sunrise flow. Stretch out anything that needs stretching and just kind of sit with the earth and meditate.
Now, this practice is a lot easier said than done especially when you’re first starting out. When it comes to yoga, I want to stress that each one of us is different, and the main purpose of this practice is to soley connect with yourself mentally, physically, and spiritually and bring harmony to your soul. As in get to know what your body is feeling, what it thinks, and the areas that you have limits or struggles that you can work through.
It’s said that our emotions and traumas get stored in the muscles & tissue throughout our body. So when we have really tight areas, normally that has a congruence with something going on with us mentally. I totally recommend looking into the whole concept. For example, I’ve struggled with a lot of back pain, especially lower back pain. It had to do with a lot of grief and sadness, and to be honest it was true, but I’ve been working on that. Day by day.
4. Making Resting & Playing = Working + Hustling
Holy shit guys. I cannot stress this one enough, and it totally brings me back to a couple months ago when I was writing about work life balance and burn outs. If you haven’t checked out that blog you can check it out here. If there’s one thing that I’ve been learning this year in the mist of everything going on (LOL), is that you can work, work, work, and get nowhere.
If you relax and bring your body to where it supposed to be, running optimally, and just act on random inspired actions that you have. Then you can get far more work done in one hour, than you would in 10 hours cramming yourself to finish it. You know that saying, when you feel your best you look your best and when you look your best you feel your best? It needs to be a daily priority for us to be nourishing our self and getting ourselves into such a prime relaxed & confident state, that we can take on anything that comes to us and still have the energy to enjoy it all.
After learning this lesson, giving away my energy to projects that aren’t actually serving me (as in getting underpaid for work that you do building up someone else’s dream that isn’t yours and overextending yourself for people who don’t give a fuck about you), wasn’t worth it anymore. If you haven’t read this one yet I highly recommend going in looking at the life lessons that I brought into this year, because they are hitting me hard core in a second round right now.
Sounds like a paradox, but I’ve struggled with mental exhaustion and burnouts more this year than ever. With everything focused on online networking and creation, it’s important to not work until you can’t take it anymore. We have all been there; that never ending cycle of going to work, getting exhausted, coming home, and just not doing shit or barely taking care of yourself because your so fucking invested in your 9-5 (that’s most likely taking advantage of you and underpaying you. Lol.)
5. Mindfully Shopping for Fresh Foods (& what I will ACTUALLY eat)
With how much I went grocery shopping and bought food, there was just so much trash being thrown away or food not getting eaten because I never got to it. Could just be me, but hey I’m throwing this out there. I just think about all the packaging that I throw away for most of these products, and I’m like ..why am I throwing away so much trash, like it’s almost ridiculous?!
I shouldn’t be throwing away more than a full thing of trash every day, and then every time I went grocery shopping I would clear out the fridge from all the old stuff. Ever since I moved I’ve been going to the grocery store a bit more, but only buying what I’m gonna be eating in the next day or two and make meals out of it.
Usually it’s a bunch of fresh foods that we can eat for the next 1 to 3 days, and then I’ll probably go to the grocery store again and pick up some fresher food for the following days. I found this to be a bit easier when it comes to changing up what I eat during the week, plus I don’t waste as much food as I was buying groceries for two weeks at a time. Therefore saving more money than my usual $150 runs at Sprouts or Trader Joe’s.
6. Prioritizing & Loving My Self
I am a huge people pleaser, or at least I’m working on coming out of this habit within myself. If you do this, STOP ASAP!!! Stop giving your damn energy away! Something that I really noticed always being a people pleaser is that I was constantly trying to maintain the energy of those around me and keep them as optimal as possible, and I would ignore what I truly want it on the inside.
When I ignored what I was really feeling about things, I was just disrespecting myself constantly. I think subconsciously I knew this, and I think we all know that when we say yes when we really want to say no, we’re literally doing our self a disservice. We’re forcing ourselves to go do some thing with our valuable time, that we didn’t even want to do in the first place, bringing in an intention of just wanting to please other people.
We are all worth giving ourselves the time the energy, the love, the materialistic items, and the spiritual healing that we all crave so deeply. We don’t have to put up with what others believe we deserve; we only need to be putting up with what we believe we deserve.
If you believe you deserve anything less than what I stated above, you need to go do some journaling, and reprogram those limiting believes within yourself to be empowering yourself instead. If you’re not your own best friend then who is? I have had a very rocky relationship with myself and I didn’t really have parents that taught me how to do that properly.
Make sure you’re taken care of before you make commitments to others. Feed yourself clean energizing food, learn new things, expand your mind, and put your passions and hobbies near the top of your priorities. Life is an about just working all the time, it’s about enjoying every single moment that we have so you wanna enjoy every day and include little things that you love into your daily routine.
7. Replace Common Household Items with Cruelty, Vegan, and/or Organic Alternatives
Switching small things that you use everyday to healthier, cleaner, and greener products is an awesome way to up-level your life clarity. Changing your toothpaste to a flouride-free one, I really like the brand hello, is my #1 essential. Look into fluoridation and the pineal gland.
I really love Mrs. Myers household cleaning products; they contain essential oils and no harmful chemicals, plus they smell AMAZING. Switching to organic unscented cotton tampons is a must. Look into it. Even small things like going from regular bananas to organic bananas, or even organic peanut butter, or grains like brown rice, make all the difference. Research “why organic”.
All the small things in your home can make that switch to something actually more real and better than for the planet. Also switching your hair & skin care products to something plant-based, organic, and/or cruelty-free, makes a huge difference; especially over time, when you start to realize that your pineal gland is starting to decalcify and you have heightened intuition & see the world around you a bit more clear. (I know that kind of went 0 to 100 but..)
I’m serious guys, do the small little things and you’re really going to notice your life change for the better. Try any of this out? Let me know in the comments below or share it on social media! 🙂
VegetablyAware 
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