Take a moment to reflect on your year so far.

On what occasion, in what scenario, did you feel most alive?

I mean truly alive. Alive in a whole body way. Physically and emotionally buzzing, an energy coursing through you like you were plugged in.

Maybe you achieved a work goal, maybe you experienced an adrenalin rush on your first parachute jump, maybe you were walking alone in the forest at dawn, maybe you had a deep realisation about yourself, maybe you completed your first ever triathlon and felt on top of the world, maybe you presented to a group something important to you and won them over, maybe you had a tender moment of love with someone close to you…

Vitality.

If you can’t find something. Go further back. Look for it like it’s a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. Seek it tirelessly. If you can’t find a single experience, look to understand components, smaller parts that provide clues to where your vitality rests, then build, add, try, experiment.

Maybe you find it easier to locate the opposite? A sense of fatigue, of being drained, of a kind of deadness? Somehow we have become conditioned to notice this more. The drudge of the commute, the dull but necessary task, the unfulfilled aspiration, the tiresome social gathering…

It’s a useful exercise to list down how you spend your time and then reflect on what nourishes you and what depletes you. Simply getting better balance in your life will improve your state of mind, your sense of happiness or fulfilment, your well-being – swap some draining activities for ones that inspire you, lift you, nourish you.

But more than that, be curious about the nature of that nourishment. Score them. Look at ones that deliver most. Why is that? What properties do they have that align with who you are, what matters to you, what gives you pleasure, what gives you meaning and purpose?

Here lie clues to that vital experience, that vitality, that sense of aliveness experienced in a whole body way – psychologically, emotionally, physically

Never stop looking. It’s vital.

You think you are alive because you breathe air?  Shame on you, that you are alive in such a limited way

Rumi