3 immediate ways to begin your spiritual journey

Wow.

Last week, I opened up about my spiritual journey and publicly processed it.

The response absolutely blew me away. It may have been our most responded-to email ever, and there was a ton of enthusiasm for the topic.

Here are some of the responses that touched me the most:

It really means a lot to me that I can open up to 30,000+ people and be fully embraced and even celebrated.

It’s given me more courage to open up even MORE in the coming weeks and months.

So while I have a laundry list of business topics in mind for this newsletter (making asymmetric bets, owning client impact, performance-based pricing and several others) I want to answer a burning question that came through:

"Jesse, this email resonated. How do I get started on my own spiritual path?"

Here are 3 immediate suggestions:

I've gone deep on this topic before, but it’s an easy and quick way to start to pull away from your "survivor" brain. The human brain is built to keep us alive, not make us happy.

So we are programmed to wake up and start looking for threats — to ourselves, our business or our families.

Why do you think you wake up and check your email looking for issues?

The immediate way to curb this is to wake up, close your eyes for 1 minute, breathe (4x4 breaths are amazing) and then visualize 3-5 specific things you are grateful for.

The more detailed and specific the better. My entries from yesterday:

• How Mila says "helicopter" — she says “hapalapa”

• The excitement I felt reading people’s responses to my spiritual email

• My first bite of Starbucks’ bacon egg bites after I fasted the previous day

One simple way to try this: Think of anything you'd be sad about if it no longer happened or existed. Then, feel your gratitude.

If you do this for 30 days straight, you'll quickly notice a separation between your ego and your true self (note: the ego is the annoying negative voice in your head, not the grateful one).

I started with the Waking Up app. It’s got an amazing crash course that's short and easy to start.

When I first started trying to meditate, it was brutal. My brain would go in a million directions, then I'd end up down one random rabbit-hole and, before I knew it, I was just having a conversation in my head.

Then I'd realize it, get frustrated and force myself to HAVE NO THOUGHTS.

It turns out I was doing it all wrong… and I don't mean "thinking" is wrong — in fact, thinking is the whole point of meditation.

The difference is in how you react to the thinking. I was judging, spiraling and generally feeling uncomfortable with my thoughts. One day, I read an article and it finally clicked:

When you have a thought, what tends to happen?

For most people, you either take an action (e.g., “Oh, I need to email that person!”) or you feel a feeling (”How could she say that to me?!”) or you make a judgment (”That was awesome!”).

Meditation is the practice of having thoughts… and NOT reacting. So, no action, feeling or judgment — just letting the thought fly by and continuing to sit in silence.

Like any practice, the more you do it, the better you get at it. And the better you get at it, the more you realize that YOUR THOUGHTS ARE NOT YOU.

Buddhists call the brain the "monkey mind" because it just spews thoughts out endlessly. The goal of meditation is just to not react to them.

In not reacting to them, your true self becomes more pronounced, and you feel more control over your choices and the ability to respond versus react.

And yes, over time, like anything you don't constantly react to, you will have fewer thoughts both during meditation and in your day-to-day life.

If it’s not obvious yet, the application to entrepreneurship is massive: Rather than reacting to the thousands of pieces of information that come at you from 100 places each day, you realize you can see something and not react, and then choose when and how to respond.  It's a game-changer.

Bonus: This is a meditation I practice often by Tony Robbins, which combines both points 1 & 2 above.

Another one I've written about: Buy the 15 Commitments of Conscious Leadership and consume the content of conscious.is. Get a coach. Live this stuff.

Here's why it will make you more spiritual, though:

The universe gives you what you need to grow when you need it. If you look at starting a business this way, it will not JUST be a way to make money and have freedom… it will also become your spiritual GYM.

Every challenge you face, every tough conversation, every major setback is there for your growth.

It’s showing you something, it’s helping you get better and, in many ways, it’s what the universe wants for you.

Once I started looking at entrepreneurship this way, it made it not only more fun, but I got way more out of it.

Of course, if there was an issue, I had to respond to it, but I also said, "Universe, what are you teaching me here?" And almost always came away with something powerful.

My coach Dave calls Gateway X my "spiritual dojo" bringing me lessons and opportunities constantly to grow. And I agree.

So, there you have it: Jesse's Starter Guide to Spirituality. In case you forgot or missed last week’s email, the benefits are REAL.

Have a great week!

jesse

PS I recorded a conversation about mediation with my coach and Andrew. It's on YouTube.