Lifestyle Advice
for Wise Persons

Compiled by Michael P. Garofalo
Valley Spirit Center

January 26, 2006

Seven Perennial Spiritual Practices:

1. Transform your motivation: reduce craving and find your soul's desire.
2. Cultivate emotional wisdom: heal your heart and learn to love.
3. Live ethically: feel good by doing good.
4. Concentrate and calm your mind.
5. Awaken your spiritual vision: see clearly and recognize the sacred in all things.
6. Cultivate spiritual intelligence: develop wisdom and understand life.
7. Express spirit in action: embrace generosity and the joy of service.

- Roger Walsh, M.D., Ph.D.
Essential Spirituality: The 7 Central Practices to Awaken Heart and Mind. (1999)

Twelve Gateways to Personal Growth

1. Preparation: Stairway to the Soul
2. Discover Your Worth: Opening to Life
3. Reclaim You Will: The Power to Change
4. Energize Your Body: A Foundation for Life
5. Manage Your Money: Sufficiency and Spiritual Practice
6. Tame Your Mind: Inner Peace and Simple Reality
7. Trust Your Intuition: Accessing Inner Guidance
8. Accept Your Emotions: The Center of the Cyclone
9. Face Your Fears: Living as Peaceful Warriors
10. Illuminate Your Shadow: Cultivating Compassion and Authenticity
11. Embrace Your Sexuality: Celebrating Life
12. Awaken Your Heart: The Healing Power of Love
13. Serve Your World: Completing the Circle of Life

- Dan Millman
Everyday Enlightenment: The Twelve Gateways to Personal Growth. (1999)

The Six Principles of Enlightened Living
The Six Perfections (Paramitas) in Mahayana Buddhism:

1. Generosity: charity, kind-hearted giving, altruism, unattached generosity, boundless
openness, unconditional love (Dana) .
2. Virtue: ethics, morality, self-discipline, not harming, proper conduct, impeccability (Sila).
3. Patience: tolerance, forbearance, acceptance, endurance (Kshanti).
4. Energy: diligence, courage, enthusiasm, vigor, effort (Virya).
5. Meditation: absorption, concentration, presence of mind, contemplation (Dhyana).
6. Wisdom: transcendental wisdom, mystical insight, enlightenment (Prajna).

- Dzogchen Buddhism, Dharma Talk: Six Principles of Enlightened Living and Six Perfections (c 50 CE)

Reverse Your Biological Age By:

1. Changing your perceptions.
2. Deep rest, restful awareness, and restful sleep.
3. Lovingly nurturing you body through healthy food.
4. Using nutritional complements wisely.
5. Enhancing mind/body integration: breathing exercises, yoga, tai chi, qigong, aikido, etc..
6. Exercise: strength and aerobic conditioning.
7. Eliminating toxins from you life.
8. Cultivating flexibility and creativity in consciousness.
9. Love and loving relationships.
10. Maintaining a youthful mind.

- Deepak Chopra, M.D., and David Simon, M.D.
Grow Younger, Live Longer: Ten Steps to Reverse Aging. (2001)

The Four Classic Western Cardinal Virtues

1. Temperance: moderation, self-control, mindful, purity, disciplined.
2. Prudence: wise, intelligent, knowledgeable, insightful, forward thinking, sagacious, sound judgment.
3. Courage: fortitude, endurance, composure, determination, will, overcoming adversity.
4. Justice: fairness, principled, harmony, equality, utility, rule of law.

- Plato (c 340 BCE), Republic

The Seven Christian Holy Virtues

1. Humility: modesty, selflessness, respectful, not prideful or vain.
2. Kindness: compassion, friendliness, gentleness, harming none, sympathy without prejudice.
3. Patience: forbearance, endurance, composure, forgiveness, not angry.
4. Diligence: energetic, decisive, careful, attentive, enthusiasm, working, zeal, not lazy.
5. Liberality: generosity, giving, charity, Sermon on the Mount, vigilance, not covetous or envious.
6. Abstinence: restraint, moderation, temperance, self-control, mindful, abstinence, not lacking sensual self-control.
7. Chastity: sexual self-control, purity, cleanliness, not lustful.

- Aurelius Clemens Prudentius (c. 410 CE), Psychomachia and Dante Aligihieri's (c 1315 CE), Divine Comedy

Ten Positive Energy Prescriptions

1. Awaken intuition and rejuvenate yourself.
2. Find a nurturing spiritual path.
3. Design an energy-aware approach to diet, fitness and health.
4. Generate positive emotional energy to counter negativity.
5. Develop a heart-centered sexuality.
6. Open yourself to the flow of inspiration and creativity.
7. Celebrate the sacredness of laughter, pampering, and the replenishment of retreat.
8. Attract positive people and situations.
9. Protect yourself from energy vampires.
10. Create abundance.

- Judith Orloff, M.D..
Positive Energy. (2004)

Five Precepts of Mahayana Buddhism

Eight Elements West

1. Consistent Exercise: Energize through safe, results-oriented exercise.
2. Body Alignment: Promote proper posture, spinal strength with flexibility, and body awareness.
3. Natural Nutrition: Implement sound eating practices for life.
4. Sound Mind: Embrace life obstacles with self-awareness, reflection, imagination and creativity.
5. Relaxation and Centering: Cultivate and calm the body-mind connection everyday.
6. Community and Environment: Surround yourself with trusted friends and family. Be kind to the Earth.
7. Individual Action: Time is precious. Let change begin now, with you.
8. Heart of the Human Spirit: Transform life through your heart, where true strength resides.

- Eight Elements West

Some Guiding Principles for Integral Practices and Institutions That Support Them:

1. They promote a simultaneous development of our various faculties.
2. They generally require mentors, rather than a single guru.
3. They require a strong and developing autonomy.
4. They are facilitated by personal traits that promote creativity in general.
5. Though they encourage individual autonomy, they require surrender at times to transformative agencies beyond ordinary functioning.
6. They require patience and the love of practice for its own sake.
7. They utilize inherited all-at-once responses, or psychosomatic compliance for high-level change.
8. They utilize the manifold changes catalyzed by images and altered states.
9. They enlist more that one mediation to achieve particular outcomes.
10. They surpass limits by negotiation rather than force.
11. They depend upon improvisation.
12. They utilized images of unity.
13. They require and facilitate conscious transitions between different states of consciousness.
14. They depend on a developing awareness that transcends psychological and somatic functioning.
15. They orient all our capacities and somatic processes toward the extraordinary life arising in us.