The Viable Alternative

I’m sure in each of our lives, we’ve seen or heard of someone who’s living what we’d view as an incredible lifestyle. The person is in great shape and is very healthy, he or she earns a lot of money, is in a fulfilling, loving romantic long term relationship or has an active, fun dating life, has great friends, has a career or a business that is very fulfilling, regularly engages in activities that he or she enjoys, overall has a great attitude, and most importantly, the person is HAPPY.

Such people have an incredible lifestyle because they’re balanced. They’re not like the person who’s filthy rich but in terrible shape with a thousand dollar a day coke habit. They’re not like the gym rat who although is in incredible shape works in a dead end job and regularly struggles to find two pennies to rub together. Neither are they like the talented and successful actress who is great at what she does and loves what she does but jumps from fiasco relationship to fiasco relationship.

These people, in one way or another, have been able to strike a harmonious balance between the different components that comprise a person’s life in a way that nurtures and fulfills them.

What’s funny is that when we see people who live such lifestyles, most of the time we admire, envy or are maybe even jealous of them because we look at their lifestyles as this huge, nebulous thing that we can never, ever hope to ever achieve in our own lives.

I’m not the type of guy to get jealous of someone for what they’ve achieved, but I’m definitely the type of guy who gets down on himself for not living a certain way yet.

Recently however, as I’ve been undergoing my process of transformation, I’ve been taking stock my own journey thus far, and I’ve begun to realize that there are certain habits that I’ve adopted in my own life over the years that are actually a part of the ideal life that I want to create. I never really noticed before because I’ve been too busy beating myself for not being where I wanted to be at in my life.

When I sat back and looked at my life, I realized that I go to the gym regularly, I drink only water and eat healthy, I pray and meditate every morning and say my affirmations, I read every day and I write to this blog on a weekly basis, I regularly listen to podcasts to expand my mind, and I go to therapy once a week to work on my issues. Though I took all of this for granted, these components in and of themselves are the building blocks of a healthy, balanced lifestyle and are what many of the successful people I admire do. I may have taken this all for granted, and downplayed it because I’m not financially successful yet, but there are many people out there who would look and marvel at all this because they’ve not been able to muster the discipline to do the same things in their own lives.

With this shifted perspective, when I look at all the people living these amazing lifestyles across many different levels, through my own experience I now see that these lifestyles that look so amazing to someone looking on the outside are made up of individual components that each came about as the result of struggle, trial, tribulation, and falling down repeatedly before a structure was finally established.

In my own life, one sees me going to the gym regularly, but looking back, throughout college I was never able to muster enough discipline to go more than a few months at a time. It wasn’t until I started working and was completely depressed and dissatisfied with my life that I was able start taking going to the gym more seriously in order to escape the boredom I felt with life.

I may drink only water now, but throughout most of my life, I refused to drink water because I felt it had no taste to it. It wasn’t until ’08, a year after I lost my hair practically overnight, when I started to take my health more seriously and thus decided to do a 90 day colon cleanse regimen that advised I drink 8 glasses of water a day for optimal cleansing and to avoid constipation, that I was able to get used to the taste of water and make a choice after the cleanse to switch to drinking only water and eliminate all sugar drinks and juices (which are mostly sugar) from my diet.

Prayer and meditation together weren’t MANDATORY aspects of my life until ’09 when I was going through serious trials and tribulation and was questioning whether I even wanted to live anymore that at my lowest point I decided that I REFUSED to be broken and resolved to strengthen my spirit and connection to God through regular prayer and meditation as soon as upon waking up. Now, five years later, my day feels off without it.

My eating consciously which involves excluding sweets and grains from my diet was the culmination of a long struggle with my utter love and addiction to chocolate chip cookies and brownies. I’d buy a bag of 15-20 cookies from Trader Joe’s and idiotically polish them off within 20 minutes, then feel completely guilty after, only to impulsively buy them again the next day when I went to the store with no intention to buy them. It was the momentum of New Year’s Day and not wanting to follow the footsteps of my father’s side of the family which has been ravaged by diabetes that I decided to finally kick my cookie addiction. Now I allow myself things like cookies and beer once a month and allow myself a cheat day or meal involving grains on weekends.

My writing a blog a week only really started last year. Before that I would write only a few blogs a year and they’d usually take me a few months to finish. Three months into therapy, I was able to clear enough emotional blockages within me that enabled me to tap into the inspiration within me to write.

To sum it up, so far every piece that fits in the ideal life I desire has come about through regular struggle, messing up and failing until one day it finally clicked.

Now there are other pieces that are required for me to have that ideal life that I’m still struggling to acquire, like using my time more efficiently, waking up as well as getting to work earlier, and learning to attract financial abundance in my life, but I know that these pieces as well will eventually come together as I persist and learn from my mistakes.

Folks, building that ideal lifestyle is all a process that gradually comes together piece by piece as you learn, struggle, make mistakes and grow. It doesn’t just fall from the sky as one whole finished piece into your living room.

It starts first with waking up from your slumber where you’re blindly following The Illusion which tells you how to think, what to eat, what to wear, what you should be doing for a living, etc. and start to make CONSCIOUS choice as to what you want each aspect of your life to look like such that it makes your heart sing and your spirit smile.

After that, it’s as simple as taking the necessary action bit by bit to achieve this vision.

Through the necessary action and the wisdom acquired, your ideal lifestyle starts to take form, until one day, you wake up and realize that the life you’re living is a reflection of the life you once envisioned in your heart.

…and I’ll let you in on a little secret, when you achieve this ideal lifestyle, if you’re truly one who’s continually growing and evolving, you’re going to want to take it to another level, and then another, and then another…it’s a never ending process.

This is The Viable Alternative.

Hope this helps,

Ike Love