You Live for Three Reasons

Published 16 February 2026 by

Martin Hamilton

A “really complete” life requires simultaneous expansion of body, mind, and soul, and an unexpressed potential in any one of them shows up as chronic dissatisfaction or “unsatisfied desire.”

Body: honoring the animal without becoming it

The body is morally neutral and spiritually important: you need health, comfort, movement, and material resources so that your higher capacities can actually function.

Living for the body means:

Adequate safety and stability: food, shelter, rest, and freedom from constant threat (Maslow’s physiological and safety needs).
Pleasure and vitality: movement, sexuality, play, sensory enjoyment in a way that leaves you more alive afterward, not more numb.
Instrumental power: energy and health that let you carry out your work, learning, and purpose; chronic exhaustion or illness narrows your world and shrinks your possibilities.

Distortions show up as:

Body over everything: life organized around comfort, stimulation, or image (status via appearance, food, substances, scrolling) with little concern for growth or contribution. This is called “the loathsome consequences of living for the body and denying both mind and soul.”
Body denied: spiritual or intellectual ideals used to justify sleep deprivation, poor nutrition, ignoring pain, or refusing money and comfort on “higher” grounds. Self-help teachers often frame this as trying to “manifest” a great life while abusing the nervous system.

Psychologically, the nervous system is the bottleneck: chronic neglect of the body degrades emotion regulation, learning, and spiritual practices. Mindfulness, therapy, or creative work sit on a physical platform. If that platform is collapsing then the rest can’t stabilize.

Mind: upgrading your inner operating system

The mind is the instrument of “thinking in a certain way”: holding a clear vision, maintaining faith in it, and acting in alignment with it. Intellectual development is just as sacred as prayer.

Lived out, this includes:

Cognitive clarity: learning to think in ordered, reality-based ways rather than letting attention be enslaved by fear and habit.
Skill acquisition: building concrete competencies (communication, money skills, craft) that turn vague desire into effective action.
Meaning-making: your narrative about who you are, what your life is about, and what experiences mean; in CBT or narrative therapy terms, your belief systems and stories.

Distortions:

Mind over everything: identifying with intellect alone—turning life into abstraction, rumination, and analysis, while relationships, pleasure, and embodied feeling atrophy. This shows up as the hyper-rational person who “understands everything” but feels empty, anxious, or disconnected in practice.
Mind denied: anti-intellectual spiritual circles (“stop thinking, just vibe”) or hedonistic living (“don’t think too much, just enjoy”) that leave people suggestible, stuck in the same patterns, and easily manipulated.

Modern self-help echoes here: change your inner model (beliefs, self-concept, mental habits) and your behavior and outer results follow. But if you upgrade the “software” (beliefs) while keeping the “hardware” (body, brain) and “network” (relationships, values) neglected, the system crashes.

Soul: the orienting center and deeper purpose

When I speak of the soul, I mean your capacity for higher ideals like love, beauty, creation, service, and conscious union with something larger than your personal story.

In more psychological language, you can think of “soul” as:

Your orienting values: the pattern of what feels ultimately worth living and suffering for.
A sense of calling: not necessarily a job, but the felt direction of your life—toward truth, beauty, justice, healing, creativity, devotion, etc.
Transcendence: experiences where self-concern softens and you feel connected to others, nature, or a higher order (flow, awe, deep prayer/meditation, profound creativity).
*Explore this article if you want a deeper dive specifically into the soul: The Soul: The Organizing Center of Your Experience

Distortions:

Soul over everything (disembodied spirituality): using “higher purpose” to bypass unresolved trauma, practical responsibilities, or money and relationship work. Many psychologists call this “spiritual bypassing.” Spiritual talk becomes a way to avoid grounded change.
Soul denied: a materially and intellectually successful life that feels strangely hollow. In positive psychology terms, high “pleasure” and even “engagement” but low “meaning” and “accomplishment that matters.”

Empirically, spiritual or purpose-oriented practices correlate with better stress regulation, immunity, and resilience, which loops back into body and mind health. Remember this: a cramped, undeveloped soul keeps you restless regardless of bodily comfort or intellectual achievement.

How neglect creates chronic dissatisfaction

Wherever there is an unexpressed possibility…there is an unsatisfied desire. This is what modern psychology frames as derailment of basic needs and values.

Seen through contemporary lenses:

If the body is under-expressed, you see: fatigue, anxiety, irritability, loss of motivation, difficulty concentrating. The person may call it “lack of willpower,” but it’s often under-recovery, illness, or dysregulated physiology.
If the mind is under-expressed, you see: boredom, stagnation, “I’m wasting my potential,” cynicism, susceptibility to conspiracy or magical thinking because the person isn’t trained to reason well.
If the soul is under-expressed, you see: success that tastes flat, addictions or compulsions used to fill a meaning vacuum, midlife crises (“Is this all there is?”), and a subtle self-betrayal when one’s deepest values are never acted on.

Most chronic life dissatisfaction is not about “too little happiness” in the vague sense, but about some live capacity (move, love, learn, serve, create, connect) that keeps being blocked or postponed.

Integration: how self-help teachers would translate the mind, body, and spirit method of living.

Across different traditions, you see remarkably similar formulations of these three motives for living:

Body → “State” or “energy”: nervous-system regulation, health habits, somatic wisdom.
Mind → “Story” or “beliefs”: mindset, self-concept, internal dialogue, attentional training.
Soul → “Spirit,” “purpose,” or “values”: what you ultimately serve and want your life to stand for.

Common integrative moves:

Start from the body
- Regulate the nervous system first: sleep, breath, movement, nutrition. Many teachers insist you can’t sustain high-quality thinking or deep spiritual practice while chronically dysregulated.
Train the mind
- Practices: journaling, CBT-style belief work, visualization, deliberate learning, focusing attention on desired outcomes and opportunities.
Clarify and commit to soul-level aims
- Values clarification, life-purpose reflection, contribution goals—often framed as “service,” “calling,” or “legacy.” Modern wellness models explicitly treat spiritual or meaning-oriented wellness as a dimension of overall health.
Let each layer support the others
- Body as power source for mind and soul.
- Mind as navigator, interpreting experience and choosing actions.
- Soul as compass, determining what counts as success and where the whole system is headed.

One practical way to phrase this idea of we live for body, mind, and soul is:

Your body is the engine, your mind is the steering system, and your soul is the map with the destination marked. If any one is offline, the trip either doesn’t happen, goes in circles, or ends somewhere you never really wanted to go

What are common mistakes in practicing the mind, body, spirit method?

Common mistakes usually come from misunderstanding how tightly we need to link thought, feeling, and present action.

Treating this mind, body, spirit method as “think and it will show up”
Focusing only on visualization or “holding the thought” and neglecting concrete behavior change and skill-building. The idea is to be “thinking in a certain way” which leads to “acting in a certain way” with what’s in front of you each day.

Using the method to daydream about big outcomes while your actual work ethic, money habits, or learning remain unchanged.

In practice, this shows up as mood-boosting fantasy rather than a disciplined creative process where vision directs your calendar.

Ignoring the “present action” requirement
Obsessing over the future result (the business, the wealth, the lifestyle) and half‑doing today’s tasks. Warning: if you put your mind in the future, your present action is divided and weak.

Skipping the small duties because they feel beneath your overall vision. If there is something to be done today and you do not do it, you have failed in that thing.

The method is closer to: hold a bold picture, then pour your whole attention into the next concrete step that is actually yours to do.

Using will to control others, not yourself
Trying to “mentally influence” or pressure specific people (clients, partners, exes) instead of using the will to keep your own mind and actions in the “certain way.” Always remember that it’s as wrong to coerce people mentally as physically trying to control them.

Confusing intention with manipulation—crafting thoughts like “they must buy from me” instead of “I will create real value and stay in a creative, not competitive, state.”

This backfires because your attention drifts from creativity and service to anxiety about other people’s behavior.

Confusing “not dwelling on lack” with denial
Taking the approach of “do not talk about poverty, disease, or failure” as literal denial of problems, rather than as a warning against obsessive focus on scarcity.

Avoiding learning about health, money, or systemic issues because you’re afraid it will “mess up your vibration,” instead of learning from them while emotionally rooted in possibility.

The constructive version: acknowledge facts, study and improve them, but refuse to emotionally live inside the picture of lack.

Focusing on results appearing (and watching for them)
Constantly checking “Is it working yet?” and mentally rehearsing what hasn’t happened. Law‑of‑attraction style teachers flag this as one of the biggest errors as constant attention keeps returning to non‑results.

Measuring your faith by short‑term external changes, which leads to yo‑yo energy: hopeful when you see a sign, deflated when you don’t.

This method assumes a kind of stubborn, non‑dramatic persistence: you act as if the outcome is certain, and you keep upgrading your present action regardless of temporary appearances.

Trying to control the “how” instead of the direction
Over‑specifying exactly how the money or opportunity “must” come, then feeling blocked when reality takes a different route. Law Of Attraction practitioners call this trying to control the outcome details instead of the direction.

Rejecting good, unexpected paths because they don’t match the script in your head.

As we assume an intelligent universe; your job is to be clear on what you’re creating and to be ready to move on any aligned channel that opens.

Neglecting body and self-care while “thinking goals”
Treating this method as purely mental, while running yourself down physically, creating chronic stress, no rest, and poor health practices. Many modern interpretations point out that this kind of misalignment sabotages both mood and performance.

Using affirmations to push through exhaustion instead of adjusting lifestyle, sleep, or environment so you can actually sustain the “certain way” of thinking.

If your physiology is constantly in threat mode, it’s very hard to maintain calm, creative, opportunity‑oriented thinking that this three part method prescribes.

Taking these principles as theory, not as a daily discipline
Consuming content over and over without ever turning its “syllabus” into a routine of daily thinking and acting. One reviewer noticed they had studied it for years without really doing it.

Skipping the repetition when learning information is detrimental. The core formula to train the mind is the same way a repetitive physical exercise trains muscle memory. If you don’t practice hitting a baseball or softball the chances of being a good hitter is very slim to nil.

An aligned practice of applying the three-part life philosophy looks less like a motivational high and more like a modest but consistent regimen where you have, a clear mental picture, gratitude, non‑competitive creativity, and full‑attention action today.