Recharging your batteries by revamping your relationship with reality and letting go of illusions.
Energy is for Everybody
This article is going to show you how you can increase your energy levels and have more fire in your belly to go out there and crush your goals. We’re gonna remind you of some basic stuff that may already know (but not necessarily be acting on) as well as some more off-the-wall approaches that you may not have considered before.
If you follow the tips shared in this article, I guarantee that you will have more energy – the only way this article won’t help you is if you read it and don’t act on it.
So many people, especially as they get older, start to convince themselves that they don’t have the kind of energy that they ‘used’ to and that there’s nothing they can do about it. They convince themselves that this is a product of getting older and that the lethargy and sluggishness that comes with it is just a part of hurtling towards death at an inexorable and unstoppable speed! Wrong!
This article is going to show you that the main cause of a lack of energy is a poor relationship with reality that leads to wasting the energy that you could be accessing on fighting to maintain illusions about yourself, the world, and reality instead.
Once you learn to understand where these illusions come from and why you ‘need’ them to play a role in your life, you can let go of them, stop fighting, and free up your realness to live your real life and make the most of your real energy.
Saying that you “don’t have energy” is ridiculous because it’s a denial of your true nature: as a human being, you are energy. This doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re energy in a ‘mystical’ sense – just that you’re connected to the whole of everything else and that you can tap into that no matter what as long as you make the right choices and set the right boundaries in your life.
Having more energy will allow you to:
- Get more done with your time.
- Make better choices.
- Have better relationships with the people you care about (and the ones you don’t).
- Feel more alive.
- Have more confidence.
- Be able to get more done with your life and dedicate yourself to a purpose that makes you more of yourself and the world a better place.
This article is going to help you examine how you can do this by letting go of some of your illusions about yourself, the world, and reality.
Illusions: The ‘Heaviest’ Things Known to Mankind
A major premise of everything that you’re about to read in this article is that the main ‘thing’ that takes away your energy is an over-reliance on your illusions, especially a tendency to fight for these illusions in the face of reality.
Getting more energy comes from understanding that things in reality work in a certain way and that you have to align yourself with this ‘way’ in order to reach the state of harmony that will allow you to energise yourself.
In short, you’re either identifying with a version of yourself that is in a state of flow and moving with life itself or you’re identifying with a version of yourself that isn’t currently flowing (because of illusory conceptual / fragmented barriers) and which is therefore in a state of friction between idea and reality. One of these versions unblocks energy and the other acts as a barrier to giving or receiving energy.
Low energy people have made ‘bad’ choices that have put them out-of-touch with reality and out of the state of flow that is required to feel a sense of really being alive and to charge our batteries. In other words, low energy people have made the choice for illusion over reality and this has led to a state of lethargy as the weight of their illusions holds them down and stops them from really flowing with life.
High energy people aren’t adding anything – they are simply choosing to remove the ideas that hold them back from themselves, the world, and reality so that they can truly flow and keep getting more energy the more ‘real’ they grow.
What you read below is going to help you identify some of the most common illusions that we carry which prevent us from accessing the amount of energy we’re naturally able to access in our state of realness.
Biopsychosocial Illusions and Increased Energy
To increase your energy and live in a real way, you need to ensure that you have the minimum amount of illusions about yourself, the world, and reality at three main levels:
Biological: You need to work on yourself at the level of your body – this almost goes without saying but so many people that I take on as coaching clients neglect this aspect of their growth and jump right into the mental or ‘spiritual’ side of things.
If you treat your body in an unreal way and cultivate an unhealthy relationship with it, then your energy levels will never be what they can be, and you will never reach your full potential and grow real.
More than just the aesthetic or physical side of things, the illusions that we carry about our own biological instincts or emotions and what we can do with them also affects our energy levels on a daily basis. We will discuss this in more detail later in this article.
Psychological: The illusions that we carry about ourselves at the level of our own psychology serve to put us in a constant battle with reality (which never goes anywhere) and this can lead to us wasting energy or draining ourselves as we attempt to keep these illusions alive.
These psychological illusions can take the shape of an unreal self-image (or mask) we try to uphold of ourselves to hide from our own ‘stuff’, erroneous ideas about ourselves, the world, and reality, or any beliefs that are motivated by the fear, pride, and desire of the ego over anything real.
Reconfiguring all these psychological areas can alleviate the friction between us and reality and stop us having to waste time in battling to uphold something that doesn’t exist (and wasting our energy). Ultimately, our psychological relationship with our own ‘stuff’ (fears, doubts, emotions, beliefs, etc.) affects the levels of energy that we have in our lives.
Social: At the level of our social self, the illusions that we carry and fight to keep alive can lead to us wasting energy on unreal relationships with phantasms that don’t really exist, as well as getting caught up in drama or unreal conflict with people that don’t really need to be in our lives.
When we have illusions about other people and their positions in our life, we can create an unreal world for ourselves that is populated with energy vampires and dysfunctional people that can drain us of our natural vigour.
Understanding the biological and psychological reasons for us choosing to keep these ‘toxic’ relationships in our lives allows us to separate the real from the unreal and to let go of anything that is holding us back or weighing us down.
Once these three areas have been reconfigured so that you have the best possible relationship with reality at each level, you can become more real in yourself and live a real, energised life as your real self re-emerges.
If you don’t feel any energy, you don’t feel your real self.
What follows will give you practical steps to get there.
Body / Mind / Realness
This article is going to help you look at practical steps for building energy (or unleashing it) from the ground up: we will start on the foundation of your body (biological), then your mind (psychological and social), then look at how to operate once you’ve unplugged the energy of your realness.
The reason we look at things in this order is that this is the healthiest way for you to work on yourself: starting to grow real by improving your relationship with your body sets the healthiest foundation for you to understand what you’re capable of but to also learn the skills and qualities such as discipline etc. that will allow you to focus on the deeper ‘stuff’ of your mental and social experience of yourself.
In short, we’ll be looking at three main areas:
Body – The biological stuff and the illusions you can carry at this level.
Mind – The psychological and social illusions that you carry about yourself, the world, and reality (social is included as ‘mind’ because our social relationships affect our self-image and what we think is possible).
Realness – What you’re left with when you let go of your illusions and start to flow with your life by getting on the Train and living a life of purpose around your real values.
We can think of these areas in terms of a simple analogy around playing cards:
Biological: The cards you’ve been dealt by life and your genetic potential.
Psychological: What you believe you can do with the cards you’ve been dealt.
Social: What the world says you can do with the cards you want to play (or what you think the world will allow you to do).
Realness: The version of you that emerges (or re-emerges) as you let go of the illusions you were hiding behind at each of these levels.
Understanding the cards that we have to play with and letting go of any false ideas about what we can do with them frees us up to play the game of life with more energy.
BODY
Move it: So many people with low energy are stuck in their heads instead of embracing their bodies and all of its potential. This is the major illusion that holds most of us back at this level: that our bodies don’t need looking after or that we can just do ‘nothing’ and expect our bodies to maintain energy levels.
Newsflash: your body will give you as much energy as you ask it to give you – if you’re sitting in front of a computer all day during the week and going from one chair to another on the weekend then your relationship with your body is an unreal one and that will be reflected in your mental and energetic experience of yourself.
Start exercising and ask your body to raise its energy levels by putting it through its paces. You don’t have to climb Everest every weekend or run a marathon but go for a walk, do some push-ups, stretch, take up a dance class – it doesn’t matter as long as it works for you and it gets your body moving.
If you haven’t worked out in a while, start small and then build in increments. Everything is a process and you can build on your progress day by day (10 push-ups this week, 20 a month from now). The aim is to find something that works for you in the context of your life but to keep pushing yourself – if you avoid your body then you avoid your life and have less energy as you go about whatever else you’re attempting to live instead of it.
Every day, you need to do something physical – even if it’s only something ‘small’. As the old saying goes, you either use it or lose it; don’t fall into the trap of not using your body and then wondering where it went.
Your body is a machine: Your body has evolved over millions of years to be able to survive the harsh conditions of the fragmented earth that we live on. This ‘evolution’ has led to certain things being ‘good’ for your body and certain things being ‘bad’ for it. If you do the things that are ‘good’ for it, then you’ll have more energy; if you do the things that are ‘bad’ for it, then you won’t. This seems pretty simple, and it is, but we can easily forget this in the modern world.
Your body is a machine and what you put into it will affect what you are able to get out of it. If you put diesel in a petrol engine it won’t get anywhere, and this can be seen as an analogy for your body: putting fake, processed foods into it is going to make you feel worse than if you put real, whole foods into it. Keeping it hydrated with water is going to make it work better than if you try and quench your thirst with sugary drinks all the time or coffee etc.
Your body also evolved to feel better in some environments than others – you don’t need to be sat down in a cubicle all day or festering in some office with clinically sterile lighting: go outside and get some fresh air and sunlight.
We don’t need to write loads here but your body has needs and you either meet them and feel the energy of being real or you feel the torpor of being unreal. The illusion that holds us all back is that our body is just some passive thing that we’re disconnected from – connect to it by getting in it and showing it who’s boss (by exercising it) and give it the fuel and environmental stimuli required for it to flourish.
If you want energy, you can’t sit around eating shit all day and then doing nothing. It’s pretty simple but easy to forget in a world of distractions where we jump right into the ‘mental’ causes of our problems instead of looking at our most basic relationships with our own body.
Master your instincts and emotions: Many of the problems in your life come from your relationship with your own biological wiring in the form of your instincts and your emotional life. Your instincts can be seen as evolved ‘prompts’ that come from your body and which are designed to push you in the direction of either survival or procreation (or both); your emotions are bodily sensations that arise as a response to what you perceive in the world.
Both instincts and emotions arise outside of your conscious awareness (i.e. you don’t choose for them to arise) but this doesn’t mean that you can’t choose to act or not act upon them. Get your balls back and be active; not reactive.
The illusion about your body at this level is that you have to act on whatever emotions or instincts arise within you. Wrong! If you only act on your emotions or instincts then your life will spiral into a state of chaos that comes from making bad choices – if every time you get horny (instinct) or angry (emotion), for example, you decide to act on it then your life will soon become a stressful one and you’ll have less energy.
Letting go of the illusion that you are a slave to the desires or compulsions of the body allows you to make ‘good’ choices by responding to what arises inside you instead of only reacting to it. This allows you to act in alignment with your values and purpose instead of just short-term motivations and to free up more space for you to have energy for yourself in the long-term.
In short, your relationship with your body is about the choices that you make – both internally and externally. Internally, you can choose whether or not to act on the instincts and emotions that arise within you and to either give in to short-term motivation or to channel your energy into long-term ambition. Externally, you can choose whether or not to put things into your body that are ‘good’ for it and to move it in a way that engenders lasting active health instead of passive vegetation and degradation.
Short version: If you treat your body as something that it isn’t, then you’re gonna have a bad time. Choose to relate to your body in a way that gives you energy – not only ever takes it away.
MIND (Psychological and Social)
A lot of what you read on this website and in Personal Revolutions: A Short Course in Realness is about the way we can relate to our own minds and improve our relationship with ourselves, the world, and reality.
In terms of letting go of our illusions, we can let go of certain ideas about ourselves at the level of our psychology:
Test assumptions about self, world, and reality: Our experience of the world is informed by our image of ourselves and the ideas that we carry as we make our way through life. If we attach too rigidly here then we will create friction between ourselves and reality and waste our energy. The ‘cure’ for this is to test our assumptions and to ensure that the interpretations we use to make sense of reality are actually pointing back to reality, not something else.
In short, this means living in such a way that we: 1) Keep uncovering the truth, and 2) Keep putting it into action.
See Personal Revolutions for a whole bunch of ‘Self-Guidance Questions’ to help you test your assumptions about yourself, the world, and reality or have a look at my ‘Unicornitis’ post which has a basic list of ‘realistic expectations’ at each level: Say ‘No’ to Unicornitis: A Public Service Announcement.
Cultivate self-acceptance: When you’re real, you accept yourself and acknowledge that you’re ‘enough’ no matter what. Anything that stops you from feeling this self-acceptance can be considered to be ‘unreal’ at some level and will take away energy as you fight to uphold the CONDITIONING that has taught you not to accept yourself.
Cultivating self-acceptance in this way means testing your assumptions in the way mentioned above, but it also means finding your balls and living from them, improving your own relationship with your own fear, and living in an unshakeable way because your realness is always in the driving seat, not your ego.
The best thing that cultivating self-acceptance can do for you is to help you destroy the false self-image that you carry of yourself that keeps you from reality and eats into your energy as you spend your life defending something that doesn’t even exist.
Be open-minded, not closed to life: The easiest way to waste energy is to convince yourself that you know everything that there is to know and that you’re ‘right’ all the time.
As soon as you take yourself off of the path of continuous life-learning you put yourself out of alignment with reality and end up going to battle with it as you take your learned ideas out into the world instead of learning new ones that are more reality-aligned. If anything is gonna take energy from you, it’s fighting a fight you can never win (and nobody is gonna make reality anything other than what it is).
Choosing to be open-minded instead of closed about things switches the stance from which you approach life to one by which you ‘ask’ questions instead of only ever asserting what you have been conditioned to think you know about yourself. This is a subtle distinction but one that allows you to let life in and fill you with new insight (which energises) instead of only ever attempting to recycle the insight you already took on board (thus taking all the life out of it and killing your energy).
Short version: A lack of energy is a sign that you’re resisting growth at some level (bio/psy/so). Aim to keep growing in all areas by learning about yourself, the world, and reality.
Those who stop learning eventually stop growing and run out of energy. Open up again and you can get it back.
Be creative: A creative life is an energetic life. If you lack energy then it might be because you closed yourself down to your creative side (which means you closed yourself down to your ‘real’ side).
Don’t buy into the hype that only some people are creative – see the reality that creativity is just about as human as it gets and that in order to be fully alive you need to live a creative life.
Real creativity allows you to be present and to tap into the best version of yourself so that you can express this and share it with the world. It’s also impossible to be really creative without being open and as being open is essential for letting go of illusions and moving with the ‘flow’ as we’ve said throughout this article, expressing your creative side is a shortcut to energising yourself.
I could write loads about creativity (and probably will) but, for now, all you need to know is that in order to energise yourself you need to find a creative outlet and dedicate yourself to it regularly. Not only will this allow you to express yourself and connect to others but it will remind you who you really are (a real human being) and recharge your batteries as you get new insight about yourself and get out of your ego and into reality (hence ‘creativity’ being in this section about psychological stuff we can do).
See the joke: If you lack energy, then it’s a sign that you may be taking life too seriously. Instead, you have to learn to see EVERYTHING about life as a joke because it is (even if there isn’t always a punch line).
Taking things too seriously just means that we have become too ‘fixed’ about our personality at some level in relation to ourselves, the world, and reality. When you allow yourself to stop being so serious about things, then you have more energy because you’re more aligned with the truth – the idea that reality isn’t ‘good’ or ‘bad’ (and therefore something we need to be serious about), it just is.
When you laugh, reality laughs with you – see the joke and stop weighing yourself down with bullshit that you don’t even need to worry about (the only reason not to laugh is because of those ‘heavy’ illusions we talked about).
In terms of letting go of our illusions, we can let go of certain ideas about ourselves at the level of our social experience:
Align the inner with the outer: The ‘success’ of your life need only be defined by one thing: how much of a gap there is between who you are on the inside and what you allow yourself to express on the outside. Not only does this apply to the psychological level of how you allow your creativity to ‘shine’ through etc. but also how you design your life around your values and ensure that the people in it are ‘real’ to the greatest extent possible.
Short version: If you lack energy, it’s likely because your inner world and outer world are too far out-of-sync. The solution for this is simple but will take a lot of work as you reconfigure your life and switch things around from outside-in to inside out:
- Get on The Train and dedicate yourself to a purpose that allows you to become more of yourself and to give something back to the world.
- Be aware of drama and where it comes from and then stop avoiding the conflict that leads to this drama in the first place.
- Get your balls back.
- Cultivate real relationships by finding your tribe and knowing your values.
- Set boundaries so you don’t have to take anything unreal on-board (you’re allowed to say ‘No’ to unreality).
The more the world that you’ve built for yourself is rooted in the assumptions of your ego and your fears about life, the more the world will sap your energy. Break the cycle by injecting something real into the world by putting what’s inside you into the world instead of only having the world creep into your experience of yourself and screwing your energy levels up.
Say ‘No’ to energy vampires: Unreal people feed on your energy by chasing drama – the reason for this is that drama gives them the kind of attention that their ego needs to keep its hold over them.
The main cure for energy vampires and other unhealthy relationships is some of the stuff listed above: get on the train, set boundaries, and get your balls back. Once you do these things, you will realise that your time and attention are the most valuable assets that you have and you won’t give them to energy-sapping activities but life enhancing ones.
In short, your energy comes down to the choices that you make: either reality or unreality in the form of illusions at the level of ourselves, the world, and reality in our biological, psychological, and social lives.
Remember that you have a choice and make the real ones.
Realness
Aligning yourself with reality at the levels of biological, psychological, and social truth allows you to rid yourself of the dead-weight of illusions that are holding back from yourself, the world, and reality and to tune into your realness.
For the sake of simplicity, your ‘realness’ can be defined as the highest or most whole part of who are you in your experience and the version of you that feels most truly alive because you are flowing with life, constantly growing, and pushing through your edge into becoming even more real.
Everything that I talk about in Personal Revolutions or on this website is ultimately about the difference between wholeness and fragmentation, or between reality (wholeness) and ego (fragmentation).
When you get your illusions in check at the levels we have discussed throughout this article, you are basically removing the fragmentary barriers to your own wholeness. Your wholeness is what is most real about you and is the source of energy that will keep you motivated and keep you moving as you keep growing and manifesting your chosen, value-based purpose with your time here on earth.
If you follow the steps and ideas discussed above you will have more energy and the reason for that is that you will have cleared your own path of the illusions that hold you back from reality.
Without these illusions, you only have your realness – make sure you do something and make the most of it.
When you’ve freed your energy up and you have tuned back into your realness, you can use it to live your real life:
- Get on the Train and live out your purpose.
- Improve your relationships with others.
- Get your balls in check.
- Kill your fear and live with abundance.
Conclusion
Get your body in check, sort your mind out, and live real. That’s all you can ever do and it feels amazing.
If this story inspired or helped you then please share it with others! 🙂
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Another outstanding article. Being real is the only way forward. Feeling good, got my balls and on the train. Many thanks.