Vishen Lakhiani argues for becoming a spiritual badass: someone who meditates and acts in the world at the same time. Skip the monastery. Instead, get 10% more empathetic, honest, and patient each day, and watch those tiny shifts compound into real change.
Chapters
I want to talk to you about becoming a spiritual badass. Most of us aren't used to hearing those words together. When we think of spiritual gurus, we think of monks who live in monasteries or philosophers writing anthologies and ivory towers. What we don't think about are the average persons. The ones who wake up every morning, commute to work in a busy city, who spend their days wired onto the lake, news via Facebook or Twitter, who set lofty ambitions in the workplace. In short, we assume that we have to make a choice between Buddha or badass. But we can choose both. What's more, the world is desperately in need of people who choose both. Spirituality is a rapidly evolving concept. At this point in history, we are more technologically equipped, more universally informed, more globally interconnected than we have ever been before. At a moment's notice, we can call up a relative who lives across the world. We can check the news to see what's happening at this exact moment, anywhere on Earth. We can teach ourselves an entire college degree's worth of information. From the comfort of our living room couches, we have an endless number of tools, gadgets, resources for navigating our outer world. What's missing are the tools we need to navigate the world between us. Despite having more opportunity for connection than ever before, we are more disconnected from each other than we've ever been. When we feel overwhelmed, we think what we need is a break to remove ourselves from the noise of our daily routines and go completely off the map. But here is what spiritual badasses know when what we are aching for is not disconnection, it's a deep sense of connection to each other. The truth about spirituality is that the shift humanity is looking for can be just as present on the 50th story of a skyscraper during a business meeting as it is in a remote mountain village in Tibet. The idea is not to disengage from the modern world, but to bring a heightened sense of awareness to the way we exist within it, to show up every day as a more engaged, more empathetic version of ourselves. Spiritual badasses know that connecting with their inner selves is only the first step of the process. The greater, more pressing job is to connect people deeply to one another, to facilitate a widespread shift in consciousness that moves us away from hyper individuality and towards a global community of people who are working towards common goals. Spiritual badasses are the curious college students working on passion projects in between lectures because they see a change that needs to be made. They are the entrepreneurs who undergo failure after failure because they know that their product has the potential to have a positive impact on the world. They are the everyday people who wake up morning after morning asking themselves, how can I give back to the world a little bit more today? How will I show up wherever I go with 10% more empathy, 10% more honesty, 10% more patience? Wide scale spiritual shifts don't happen overnight. They don't require rapid rearranging of priorities, a complete overhaul of our lifestyle, or even a sense of disconnection from society. They happen over in pieces. Every time you meditate for one minute longer each time you bring the wisdom you gain through meditation into some part of your waking life. What the human race needs right now is not people who abandon their ambition in favor of endless introspection. What we need are people who have come alive through lessons introspection teaches death. People who fight 10% harder each day for the contributions that they know they can make, who educate themselves 10% more about the issues that are plaguing us on a global level, who are willing to be 10% more patient, 10% more empathetic, 10% more present with one another every single morning they wake up. Being a spiritual badass isn't about radical disconnection. It's about radical widespread we connection. And that becomes a little bit more possible each time we realize that the correct choice between Buddha and badass is both.
