The 4 Pillars
Physical
Raise Your Level in the physical sense means you must treat the body as a mirror of what you breathe, consume and live.
This means you are choosing to live a healthy and active lifestyle through physical fitness and nutrition. Research tells us that physical exercise prevents heart disease, lowers high blood pressure, reduces LDL cholesterol, improves digestion, improves joint flexibility, enhances mental function, prevents cancer, prevents diabetes, prevents osteoporosis, combats depression and has many other beneficial effects.
In fact, physical exercise is absolutely essential for being healthy.The difficulty for most people isn’t finding something to do. It’s actually DOING IT. The key is to make exercise a DAILY habit.
This doesn’t mean constantly overexerting yourself, but knowing your body and challenging it, according to your preferences, skills and abilities. Be creative, and find things that you enjoy. For some, this may mean taking a walk each day in a beautiful setting, for others this may mean training for a marathon. You know your body’s needs, strengths and limitations, so challenge yourself within your own context.
By physically challenging yourself, you can unlock the doors to new thresholds. Opening yourself to new and stimulating experiences makes your body adapt and strengthen.
This is the wonder of the human body, it always adapts. Thus, the physical cannot be totally separated from any of the other RYL principles. However, the physical self must be isolated and challenged to allow individuals to reach their full potential.
Mental
Raise Your Level mentally means that you are choosing to engage and elevate your mental self by building your mental muscle. Everyone has purpose.
A key factor in helping you develop that purpose is identifying your personal strengths. If you can identify and build on those strengths you are the leader and the follower of you and your destiny. The mental is what drives you. It’s your core. That’s what makes you who you are.
Your mental mind set is what affects everything you do. It can be the difference in success or failure. Therefore, when you make up your mind and decide to raise your level don’t just be good, strive to be excellent. Excellence doesn’t mean perfection.
“The mental is what drives you. It’s your CORE.”
Compete with yourself and set out to give your best effort to the task or issue at hand. Mental is 100% of our daily process. If you are choosing to Raise Your Level, you must understand that you are not like everyone else. You are choosing to lead by example.
Mentally, this is a challenge to encounter the unknown. Don’t be afraid to take risks, overcome your obstacles, challenge yourself, and success has a greater potential to follow. The will to compete, teach, learn, and most of all, the undying will to succeed are all intangibles of RYL.
Spiritual
Raise Your Level in the spiritual aspect means to take your spiritual journey to the next level via knowledge and application.
Pending where you are within the process and what you want to achieve, you can begin your quest one of three ways:
- By seeking a basic introduction to your spirituality and the higher power
- Seeking a better understanding of what you already know
- Reaffirming your faith.
Often times we get stuck in mediocrity and believe that it is acceptable to be average or that it’s okay to disregard your conscience (that voice inside) telling you that there is something out there bigger than you.
“Spiritual elevation opens the mind…When your spirit is lifted then your mental and emotional state will be also.”
Spiritual elevation opens the mind and allows you to recognize areas of your life where you have fallen short. Not according to the standards of the world, but according to the Creator of all things. This is a challenge to look inwardly and get in touch with your spiritual self. When your spirit is lifted then your mental and emotional state will be also.
Ultimately, to raise your level spiritually is the ability to personalize and experience the idea that, as human beings, everything we are able to achieve physically, mentally and emotionally is a direct result of our personal relationship with God.
Emotional
Raising one’s emotional level involves recognizing and experiencing one’s full range of emotions, expressing them freely, while also using them as indicators to know who we are and what we need from ourselves and others.
No one likes feeling emotional pain, so we often try to hide or repress negative emotions, such as shame, fear and anger. However, even if we repress them, these negative emotions will have a significant impact on our sense of well being. In fact, repressed pain does not go away, it actually eats us from the inside out, causing imbalance in the form of emotional, mental, physical and spiritual pain.
“…repressed pain does not go away, it actually eats us from the inside out…”
Furthermore, when we repress negative emotions we lose access to the full extent of our positive emotions as well. If we numb ourselves to pain we also numb ourselves to fully feel and express joy and peace. Emotionally raising one’s level involves dealing with both positive and negative emotions in healthy ways, so they can do what they were designed to do, alert us to who we are and what we need, so we can make necessary adjustments in our lives.
Once we start experiencing all of our emotions and seek a more honest, loving relationship with ourselves, everything changes. We start to naturally and freely have a sense of who we are, and what we need to maintain a healthy sense of self. We speak our truth more clearly and openly, and set healthy boundaries.
We own our right to be alive and be treated with respect and dignity. When we emotionally raise our level we are free to experience positive and negative emotions, while maintaining balance, rather than being bound by repressed pain that eats away at who we really are and what we strive to be.