Spirituality is the Foundation
Spirituality is the Foundation
"It makes little sense to work on nutrition, and developing our physical bodies, only to leave our minds in flabby condition."
Spirituality has to be constantly worked on, for I've seen it in my own life. If I don't continue in my pursuit for receiving spiritual light in my life, it fades and diminishes, weakening me in my fight. In my opinion, spirituality is the foundation to complete change, especially when it comes to overcoming addiction.Spirituality is the foundation of this WAR Program, and is something we get better at overtime as we diligently pursue it. If you think about this WAR program, and the lifestyle it promotes, we have three things, in a broader sense, that are the key components of this program: Nutrition, Physical Fitness or Being Physically Active, and Spirituality. There is a simplistic relationship between these three key elements of the WAR program that anyone can recognize if searched out properly.Spirituality as the foundation of the WAR Program:Spirituality is one of those things that may take longer to develop in our lives than physical fitness or nutrition; however, it is still the foundation, in that, eventually it covers the broadest spectrum of this program. One may come into the program benefitting first from the physical fitness aspect. As he/she continues to push themself physically and mentally they begin to realize they want more which then leads them to nutrition. As nutrition is incorporated, they begin to see the benefits it plays in having a better experience in the gym and life performance. They find that they feel better when they fuel themselves properly resulting in an overall body composition change, which becomes motivating.Unfortunately, there is still something missing in their life where they still have trouble finding peace outside of the gym experience. This is where spirituality comes into play. We need something outside of the physical and nutritional realm to fuel our souls. We need a spiritual light about us so we can receive the gifts that only spirituality can offer, which is pure peace to the human spirit. These spiritual gifts are the fruits of everything that is good and real in life such as: patience, humility, love, honesty, meekness, integrity, faith, hope, poise, being thankful, being charitable, being less prideful, family, and so on and so forth.Now you can see why I say Spirituality is the foundation of this WAR program. It is the most promising and elite avenue to growth and change; that is, if you really want to experience complete change and become an amazing human being through this WAR Lifestyle. We can workout and eat healthy all we want, but without placing the huge emphasis on the spiritual component of this program we are still lacking the necessary gifts to really change, and overcome our addictive behavior.We can't just expect to be a spiritual person just because we say we are. When I first got into spirituality, I noticed that it was just like anything else that I wanted to get good at; I had to practice and work at it. I had to focus on taking time out of my day to work on my spirituality through prayer, meditation, and reading influential books, in my case, books about God and Jesus Christ. However, reading, studying, and praying are all the easy aspects of spirituality, actually living and being a spiritual person is the hard part. Carrying that spiritual light consistently is a chore in itself due to the worldy temptations that surround us on a daily basis. For instance, it's tough to be a spiritual person if you walk around all day full of pride and envy. Pride and envy lead to hate and contention. There is absolutely no way you can feel spiritual if you are full of pride and envy because pride and envy go against everything a spiritual person is all about. You can't be a spiritual person if you are a person of contention. If this were the case, you would be walking around all day with hate in your heart which then eliminates peace, therefore, diminishing any glimpse or hope of spirituality.Another example is how we choose to speak or how we choose to react to certain circumstances. It's also what we choose to watch, or even look at and listen to. It would be hard to be a spiritual person if you were a person that looked at pornography. Pornography is horrible for the brain, and is the fastest way to drive spirituality out of your life. Maybe you're proud that you've been clear for two years, and are happy about it, but have replaced it with pornography, which in my opinion is every bit as damaging as the worldly substances, if not more damaging, and more addicting. Our brain is the most powerful thing we obtain, and these images pollute our brain, and are engraved for life. I can remember as a six or seven year old seeing pornography for the first time, and I can still to this day remember what I saw; that's the power of pornography, it's engrained for life.I just used pornography as an example, but driving spirituality out of our lives can come from all different angles, and you can feel when you aren't doing the things that are in line with it.The Loudest Person in the Room is usually the weakest person in the room:Spirituality takes practice and diligent effort on our part. To feel it consistently in our lives, we have to be careful and conscientious as of to how we carry ourselves at all times. We have to be humble and low key so that the worldly things don't get the best of us. If we are laughing all of the time, swearing, joking, and even being loud; these create a weakened state in our personalities, which then makes it easier for us to fall back into our addictive behavior. We become weaker when we are loud. We have to carry ourselves in a low key, and even meek manner in an effort to not let our personalities get away from us.Now I'm not saying that we are not to laugh, or even joke at times, cause that's not the point I'm trying to make at all. What I am saying is that there is a fine line between carrying a spiritual presence, and a worldly presence, and for the individual that struggles with impulsive decision making, which most addicts do, we have to be careful in how far we let our personalities go. We have to keep things right in front of us, for if we don't, the spirit can be driven out of our heart, leaving us to fend ourselves in the battle against the Dragon.-Hawk