Three realms

As I learn more about different kinds of energy frameworks, I see myself more and more existing in three different realms: the intellectual, the physical, and the spiritual.

The intellectual is by far the most comfortable, or at least the most familiar. It’s the realm of doing tasks, scrolling through my phone, solving problems. Thinking lives here, as do anxiety, addiction, and distraction. Here I ask myself, “Am I doing this right? Is this what I should be doing? Am I wasting time or being productive?” This is where I spent all my time for years because I didn’t know that anything else existed.

In the last few years, I’ve become more familiar with the spiritual. This is where the intuition, subtle energies, and the soul live. It’s where I ask myself, “What do I want? What is in my highest good?” The answers to these questions are often challenging to follow through on because they often lie right in the center of what the intellectual fears the most. But like the intellectual, the spiritual is internal so it feels safer than…

The physical. This is the realm I’m admittedly least familiar with even though it’s the most tangible. This is where I ask, “What do I need right now?” It’s a realm that involves limitation because the physical has limits. That terrifies me, because internal realms seemingly have no limits. I don’t have to stop and rest when something is in my mind, but when I try to externalize it, I do. It feels weak, particularly according to the intellectual, so I try to pretend the limits aren’t real. That, of course, leads to burnout, illness, and exhaustion. That is where I’m most familiar with this realm, unfortunately. But when I’m not in one of those states, the physical requires vast amounts of effort just to remember to check in.

Funny enough, for the longest time I thought that I was interacting with the spiritual and physical, but really I was in the intellectual realm. I would pray and interact with God in an intellectual way. I would eat or exercise because I knew it was necessary. But I wasn’t actually listening. Where I’m listening determines which realm I’m in, and probably 80% of the time I’m still listening to the intellectual. It takes effort to remember to listen elsewhere, and even when I do I often find myself still in the intellectual. Most obvious is when I’m meditating and then I realize that I’m sitting there worried someone is watching me rather than listening to what’s going on inside. So it doesn’t just take physical effort. It also takes mental effort and intention to shift my focus and relax into other realms.

The work is in the noticing and then it’s in the intention. I have to want to shift myself somewhere else. That’s not easy to do. As I said, the intellectual is the most familiar, which makes it feel the most safe.

But as the most familiar, it’s also the realm that offers the least amount of opportunity to grow and change my life into something that feels more meaningful or more alive. These three realms exist because they’re all necessary to create wholeness. The more I realize that, the more I want that, the stronger the intention becomes and the more I open up to a better balance.