The Physiological, Psychological, and Spiritual Prerequisites of Success: Soul

The soul is a vibration. Like music, it has its notes, its keys, its pitches and tones. Souls have high and low volumes, bass, and treble. Some souls create melodies together and dissonance with others. I learned about these principles and laws of music in The Music Lesson by Victor Wooten. I was enamored by the similarities in music as it relates to the spirit and how close it is to agape, also known as unconditional love or God’s love. I heard this definition of love from an interview of Paulo Coelho by Krista Tippet on her Onbeing Podcast. Paulo Coelho is the author of The Alchemist, a best selling book about a boy’s journey to realize his dream and mastering the lessons of the soul as he moves toward that dream. Even as I write this, I feel this strange fluttering in my chest and I know that it’s my spirit communicating with me about the subject it most wants to share. This is how I treat my soul and nourish it to reflect an outward vitality to the purpose of our lives. I decided to start this post with music because I believe the sounds and lyrics of this song is a reminder about doing the things that truly make us feel alive. Your soul has already traveled through the universe, felt the connection between all things, experienced space and time on a single plane. It is a pure, higher dimensional being. However, it longs to experience things that can only be found by slowing down vibrations found in mortality and the physical world. It wants to experience time and space on separate planes, understand the full range of each emotion separately, and it has an innate desire to improve yourself and everything around you. This is the part of yourself that wants the best for you, wants you to fulfill your true potential, it wants your happiness.

The soul, like the mind and body operate on the same universal truths that it can also be hurt, infected, and destroyed. The mechanisms of which are beyond the limits of our imagination. We do know that the body and mind play an integral role in keeping the soul from being harmed. Like a shield, the mind defends through subconscious action or thought. I have a belief that emotions are how the soul communicates to the mind and body. Too often, I see nurses that have developed emotional defenses that are too strong. The defense callouses itself to the point that it prevents their own soul from being able to communicate with them. This is what it means to “feel dead inside.” You lose compassion and start to become robotic in the way you move and work. It’s why the burnout rate is so high in areas where time and experience are so concentrated like in the E.R. You definitely age more quickly in that environment. Emotions is how we know the soul has been wounded. Pay attention to your reaction when being insulted. Some people automatically retaliate verbally as if it was a mental reflex or use their body to react physically to the emotional state through body language or force. It is a fascinating process to discern what behavior is the mind and the true message that the soul is attempting to convey. More often than not, they are typically at odds because we don’t fully understand ourselves. Our minds cannot fathom the possibility of an alternate force greater than itself inhabiting the same physical. It is a relationship that must be built on trust, faith, and love. Why do you think so many patients claim to suffer from anxiety or depression? I can say with almost 100% certainty that they are experiencing a form of spiritual pain that has been exacerbated by their physical and mental condition. Whenever the mind and body begin to fail, the soul is quick to send signals via emotional network to tell you something needs to change. Like people looking for a breakthrough, they need to evolve or perish. The soul is the last line of defense when the body and mind have been pushed to the limit. If no drastic change is taken, the negative pattern will consume the entire person to the point their soul no longer want to be in this world or in that body. If the conditions become bad enough, the soul will prefer to go back to the dimension it came from, leaving behind the mind and body to decay.

What can we do to serve our souls? The Pareto-level advice is to try something that stresses your mental and physical state in a controlled environment, where only your spirit is left to keep you going.  The soul’s greatest weakness is fear. Fear can convert a soul of light into a soul of darkness. Giving yourself an opportunity to experience fear and then overcoming it will undoubtedly strengthen your soul to resist any form of darkness. The easiest methods are activities that threaten your life. I don’t mean in a suicidal way, I mean experiences like sky diving, hiking up a roped path with steep cliffs on either side, in the deep ocean with sharks around, snowboarding down a double black diamond at full speed, or drifting a car into a corner without braking. These are extreme adrenaline pumping examples for effect, but I’ve been able to experience this through running the Los Angeles Marathon, lifting 400 lbs off the ground, climbing onto my roof to install an antenna. You can also go into a country that is completely foreign in culture and experience the feeling of being an outsider and you are completely lost in the language and directions of any familiar monument. These are moments when time compresses and your spirit is called forth into action to use every possible mental and physical resource to keep you alive. If you survive, then your spirit and mental strength grows just a little bit. You need to plan time to grow your spirit with the new and exciting. We don’t have to wait until we’re old and retired to do them. A great book I enjoyed is The Four-Hour Workweek by Timothy Ferris. An unconventional approach to starting a business and going for it 100% and succeeding. What’s more surprising is that the popularity of his book produced a new subculture of the tens of thousands of employees that succeeded in achieving a remote work agreement. The perception of freedom of location injected new ideas and possibilities into the world. I had to do it. I was able to translate how I can apply remote work in the field of nursing where everyone assumes the job is about bedside patient care. I am currently taking the time to navigate this tumultuous niche to prepare for a world where bedside care will be a thing of the past. 

I consider bedside nursing care an industrial age, legacy position. A legacy position is any job that was around when your great grandparents were alive. These include: nurse, doctor, lawyer, CPA, firefighter, police officer, paramedic, and other “essential” positions. There will be more and more people clinging onto fewer and fewer “traditional” jobs. With the advent of management controlling the budget, they find more and more superfluous positions to justify the amount of funding that institution requires. This is a malignant metastases of the original intent and becoming a parasitic representation of the inefficiencies of our tax dollar spending. As technology simultaneously creates a life of ease, the lesser need we will have for humans in an automated system. Automation is the goal of almost every successful business because it involves the most amount of money, with the least amount of effort. To put simply, there won’t be enough jobs in the future as the country will look for stability in the face of economic uncertainty. What happens when the baby boomers die? What other ginormous group are we supposed to care for? They are the only generation that can probably afford overpriced healthcare because of all the assets they acquired in their golden era. That era is long gone and the world they told us about, retirement, pensions, social security, will not exist for our generation. A cousin of mine, a lead engineer for a chip manufacturer, is being paid about $35/hour. This might sound good depending on where you live, but he lives in Newport Beach, CA and paying an obscene amount rent and other cost of living expenses like bar tabs. Comparatively, I am currently making  $78/hr working remotely from home. Half of my time is spent writing blogs, conducting research, catching up on my business, playing video games, meditating and household chores. I’m obviously using some Information Age hack and leveraging technology by selling my attention where my physical self is of no consequence. Why the huge discrepancy in the wages to work ratio? For my cousin, the reason he is tolerating this work is because there are just too many engineers and not enough jobs. Competition is high so pay can be subsequently lowered and physical presence can be mandated. If he refuses, they’ll find another willing engineering graduate to take his place. Mind you, he carries two phones and is expected to be available to take calls after-hours and weekends. Since he’s in his early 20’s, he has the energy and drive, but we all know that is not sustainable. 

I know many of you are looking for an answer from the tagline of this website and I can tell you that it is true that you can earn more than a doctor. I have the option of making $1000+ every day if I wanted to. I have the option to take my remote work to a third world county and live like a king. But the question I’m asking myself is “How can I make the most money, with the least amount of effort?” Ah you see? That puts me on a different trajectory entirely. I’m looking for a balance between work and play because I want to live now and not 30 years from now. I am making sure to balance my mind, body, and soul. This requires you to create space and time for each one. If you’re working 24/7, your body will let you know by giving you a heart attack. Your mind will let you know by giving you a mental breakdown. Your soul will let you know by filling you with dread and angst every time you clock in and repeat the same unfulfilling work. You need to ask yourself what will you do when you no longer have to work? The purpose of earning more is so you can free yourself of time constraints and give yourself the freedom of choice. First and foremost, I have the responsibility to lay down the foundation of the nursing hustle philosophy moving forward. These are the prerequisites for success and the basis for becoming the best version of yourself. I want you to succeed and I am someone who is only one step ahead of you so I can share everything I’m learning while it is still fresh. I enjoy reading and listening to people who are already successful, but they forgot what it was like to be a beginner in their journey to mastery. Like in the disclaimer in the first post, I will show you ideas that bend the rules of ethics to your advantage and you will challenge it by saying “You can’t do that.” I am up to debate this topic as being a clear sign of the changing times and the fact that you disagree most likely means that I am on the right path. “Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect.” -Mark Twain. We live in an age where we can be anywhere in the world, at anytime. There is a shift in technology occurring that people call the metaverse where we imagine Ready Player One VR headsets. But the real metaverse is actually an idea and paradigm shift of the integration of technology and life that will have world changing consequences. This will have dramatic impact on the healthcare sector. My goal for you, is stay one or two steps ahead of the changes and position yourselves effectively while the rest of the world is still catching up. Hopefully by then, we’d have retired early and leave us free pursue the dreams we’ve forgotten as a child. The dream of the soul.