You are your best investment.
Your life economy is the wealth and health of yourself, your family, your community and your environment, especially in terms of your body, mind, and spirit as it impacts your entire life cycle.
You’ve been given this body, this lifetime.
Are you going to spend it? Or are you going to invest in it?
Are you going to deplete it? Or expand into it’s potential?
Are you going to engage fully? Or hide on the sidelines?
How do we measure our life economy?
Recently, I had a powerful conversation with my Coaching Mentor. We were discussing living life in a flow state and our mindset around what is an expense and an investment when it comes to our life, our health. From the vantage of the yogi, we clearly look at the body, mind, and emotions. The first step is to start noting how we categorize our own exchange of energy, value, and money in the world. When you make a purchase how do you categorize it? We oftentimes consider the purchase of a house a “good investment”, but spending money on a health coach as an expense we can’t afford. Once I started thinking about this differently I started to invest in myself, because I began to see the return on the investment.
An expense is something where you get little to nothing positive or expansive in return. It’s a waste. Think binging on your favorite bag of chips. There is little to no nutritional value. It’s costing you more than the value of the product. Your skin and digestion suffer. The experience is short-lived and while you may get short-term satisfaction, the long-term impact is illness, fatigue, sluggishness and heaviness.
An investment is something that continues to give back to you in terms of mind, body or spirit. Think 10 minutes of daily meditation. The experience is short-lived, but it has a long-lasting impact on every interaction you have with other people throughout the day, throughout your life. Those 10 minutes continue to reinvest in you over and over again throughout the day and your life.
What is a true expense vs an investment?
Try this. Read through each statement below and step into the role of your own life economy. Which one is an expense and which one is an investment?
- Your $8 green juice.
- Your family trip to _________________ (fill in the blank).
- Your last meal (whatever it was).
- Any prescription meds you might be taking.
- The visit with a friend in the hospital.
- The late night cocktails with friends last week.
- The day you put off work to stay home with your kids.
- The text messages you ignored from a friend.
- The purchase of a new car.
- Registering for a 3-day conference on health and wellness.
- Signing up for a meditation retreat.
- Carving out time to call your parents.
Can you feel the difference? Start to ask yourself this question every time you spend money or make a decision about your time. Is it an expense or is it an investment in terms of your “life economy”? And start to track how your spending starts to shift into greater alignment with what will continue to be re-invested in your body, mind, and spirit.
My experience has been that the more I invest in my own life economy, the lives of my family, my friends, my community and my environment shift. I’m more conscious, more connected and more in touch with what is going on around me. Try it and let me know what you experience.
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Rachel Peters is a yoga teacher, yoga health coach, lifestyle and habits expert, easeful living advocate, and lover of wild places. She leads others towards Embodying Ease through a yearlong wellness & lifestyle journey to dissolve perfectionism, embody daily habits that promote mental clarity, overall ease, and deeper connection to life on this wild ride of modern living. Learn MORE today!