Manu is a seasoned practitioner of so-called “mirrorology”, a most potent technique for uncovering the blind spots that tend to run our lives negatively and unbeknownst to us. He is the founder of In Me I Trust Coaching & Healing, a personal development practice, and author of several e-books on topics of Self-realisation, including his 777 Message.
Personal development methods generally focus on a limited number of levels of your being, zooming in on the mental-cerebral layer or the emotional-gut-brain layer. Some fields of personal development target the physical layer specifically, often accompanied by work on the mental layer. However, you consist of more levels than just these two or three. The other layers also require your attention if you aim to achieve encompassing well-being in your life. In these times of hyper-specialization and reductionist fragmentation, we, yes, you need approaches that consider you as the whole person you are.
This article's checklist helps you view and analyze yourself from that holistic perspective.
How are personal development and personal hygiene related?
The approach to personal development I advocate and apply goes beyond building capacities and skills to fully develop and realize your work-floor or sports potential or to achieve better results in this or that field of business or sports. Personal development, in my approach, is very much a domain of personal hygiene more in line with the aspect of personal development that focuses on improving your quality of life, increasing self-knowledge, and fostering conscious self-guidance, in short, about becoming your own best life coach.
‘Personal hygiene’? Isn’t that more about keeping yourself clean by washing your hands, brushing your teeth, washing your clothes, and the like? What does this have to do with personal development and self-improvement? Those “classic” personal hygiene activities aim to cleanse yourself at the physical level to keep the physical you fresh and healthy. It’s time to broaden your personal hygiene scope if you want to achieve an overall sense of well-being.
Apply it to all the levels that make up your entire being, your wholeness. Looking at that wholeness, the idea is to cleanse and keep yourself clean at all seven layers of your being. You’ll notice that I use the terms ‘levels’ and ‘layers’ interchangeably here.
In this short article, I will provide you with a checklist for the seven levels of your being, along with brief descriptions for each level of what to look out for to cleanse and maintain yourself at each level. Some checks on the list might seem self-evident to some, but the theory often is, but the practice is usually much less so.
The checklist I present in this article is about checks you can do and actions you can take for yourself without the need for anyone else. Go through each of the seven levels and identify which one, or ones, require the most work from you right now or perhaps which ones you need to restart working on at this stage of your life.
1. How well do you take care of your body and all of its needs?
The physical you have to digest and deal with is pretty much all it is that you do on this physical level and all of the other levels. It is, therefore, of the utmost importance to keep this layer clean, healthy, and strong, making the list for this layer by far the longest:
Physical cleanliness: the actions comprised in the classic definition of personal hygiene.
Dietary cleanliness: This one is obvious to most of us, yet it is difficult to put into practice.
I am not a certified nutritionist, but I do know that a good deal of the beverages and food items out there are not for human consumption. I am not saying you have to do like me and only drink still water and tea, but try to limit your intake of toxic and sweetened beverages. Furthermore, stay clear of highly processed foods and apply the approach “Can I still identify the food items on my plate?”.
Your food can bring you disease, but it can also be your cure. It helped me free myself from my painful migraine attacks.
Also important to note with respect to dietary cleanliness is to guard your overall pH balance.
Of course, certain organs and bodily fluids have a particular pH value that is needed for, e.g., digestive purposes. I am talking about avoiding being too acidic or alkaline overall, where most people have to watch out for an overly acidic body. Food and supplements can ensure you maintain a healthy, balanced pH value overall. I also take an alkalizing bath once a week, using alkaline bath powders.
There are pH test strips available on the market to check your overall acidity, preferably in the mornings. As it is not my intention to make publicity for this or that brand here, I will limit myself to advising a quick search on the internet. That should provide you with a good list to choose from.
Sleep hygiene: going to bed well before midnight does sound simple, but again, many people find this a challenge. Give your body the rest it needs and deserves. Go to bed a good hour before midnight.
Posture hygiene: I have been going to osteopathy sessions for over 20 years and shiatsu sessions for over 15 years. I have taken Dorn classes and had many Dorn sessions done on myself, next to several other skeleto-muscular focused therapies. As a result, I do know a thing or two about the effect of our posture. So be aware of how you sit and stand posture-wise. No slouching, no crossing your legs, stand and sit up straight, open up your chest, and consciously relax your shoulders as these “carry” a lot of your stress. If you can, spend time standing behind your desk (if you have a height-adjustable desk).
If you suffer from severe (lower) back pains and/or neck pains, go see a physiotherapist or an osteopath. Prevention is always better than the cure, so avoid ignoring the signals of your body in this respect as well; don’t let it turn into a lumbago or, worse, a hernia.
Breathing hygiene: as a certified breath coach, I am, of course, very much an advocate for breathing hygiene. Check your breathing pattern for dysfunctionality. There is a simple test called the “Control Pause”, where you measure the number of seconds you can hold your breath in a non-forced way. To avoid cheating, you hold your nose for the full time you are holding your breath. The catch is that you must be able to start a normal breathing rhythm again when you feel you have reached your holding limit and start to breathe again. If you have to gasp for air upon releasing your nose, the test result will be incorrect. The test isn’t a competition; it is designed to check how long you can hold your breath in a non-forced way, whereby the number of seconds reveals how (dys)functional your current breathing pattern is. Check your result against the Buteyko scoring grid, which is available online.
There are some simple breathing exercises that you can practice daily to correct your breathing pattern and to help you deal with the physical stress effects you experience, such as tension in the shoulders. Of course, if your result indicates severely dysfunctional breathing (anything under 20 seconds, basically), get professional help to get the required guidance and appropriate exercises.
Some more tips in this respect: nasal breathing instead of mouth breathing. If you notice you breathe through your mouth, start by taping over your mouth. You do that for as long as you can at first. I sleep at night with my mouth taped over, not to prevent me from snoring and to be clear, but to keep on breathing through my nose during my sleep as well. Taping over your mouth, however, also works for snoring prevention. I mention the Sleep Well Tape brand, as it is endorsed by the Dutch Buteyko Institute.
“The mind benefits from stillness, the body from movement.” Hence this check item: Activity hygiene: it’s no surprise to anyone that being a couch potato isn’t all that healthy. You don’t have to be an Olympian either, but you do have to have sufficient physical activity daily, even if that activity is, e.g., walking.
Your body never lies, and prevention is always better than the cure. Focus on maintaining your health at the physical layer; don’t wait for an illness to give it the attention it deserves.
“Listen to your body’s whispers, so you will not have to hear its screams”;
2. How well do you sense and manage your emotions consciously?
Emotional hygiene, keeping yourself clean at the emotional level, is about monitoring what emotion presents itself, not to suppress the emotion but to acknowledge it without getting stuck in it. This is a hard one, I admit. When you get triggered, a lot of “charged-ness” is involved, making it at first a real challenge to keep this layer cleansed.
To be crystal clear, it is not about rejecting or pushing down emotionality; on the contrary, it is about We don’t get to pick which emotion arises in us in a given situation. Personal hygiene at the emotional level is about being connected to, about being able to sense and consciously move through the emotion of the moment without getting sucked into an emo-rollercoaster or an overly rational stance ignoring all that is sensed in the gut area cut off as it were from the part of you below the diaphragm or, even, below the throat if you are hyperrational.
Check for yourself which type of approach you usually adopt: the emo-rollercoaster or the emo-shutdown.
What to do? Become the observer of your emotion and of the ‘charge’ in it. You let it be without projecting or taking it out on anyone else as good as you can. You sit with it and allow it to pass through you without completely engulfing you, “taking you over.” Identify it, and express (see level 5) how you are emoting at that moment. Naming it usually already has a releasing effect. When you let the emotion be what it is, you can move through it and “clean” yourself of any heaviness.
The aim at this level is to be able to emote and move through and on by consciously feeling what presents itself and allowing it to be as it is until the heaviest charge has subsided. This replaces the approach many have of keeping the emotion running in their whole being for hours or even days, sometimes with an “I shouldn’t feel like this, this isn’t allowed” or an “it is his/her fault” leading to an increased charged-ness, which usually leads to an unfortunate expression of this emotional charge in one way or another.
“Your triggers arise in you (!), the one true place to effectively process and release them”;
3. How firm do you stand in your life when it comes to what you like to do, say, have, or think?
What is this “self-hygiene” level of your being about? It concerns knowing what is yours, what truly belongs to you, and what belongs to others that you can leave with them. This is not meant in terms of material things, of course, but in sensing what is and what is not in line with who you are, with what does and what does not give you energy, with what aligns with your values and what does not.
Maintaining hygiene at this level is about being able to “stand firm in your power,” as they say, being connected to yourself and keeping that connection as much as possible in any setting.
You can physically feel this in your solar plexus nerve centre, at the level of your stomach, somewhat below your diaphragm. You can increase the sense of connection to this layer of your being by meditating on that nerve centre, putting your centre of attention in this part of your body. When you start with this, it helps to put your hand(s) on that part of your body whilst doing this to sense it more and more. The aim here is to connect to that spot in your being when checking any answers to questions you find important life questions; you don’t need this for your grocery shopping list.
Also, speaking with your centre of attention in that spot allows you to speak from an authentic place, compared to purely speaking from the cerebral mind (mental) level, which can be confusing more often than not, with all the mind chatter going on.
“Know and choose what belongs with you, and what does not”;
4. Have you considered the quality of your social interactions and the relationships you maintain?
Social hygiene concerns the “social level,” which is about the people you choose to have in your life. What kind of people have you attracted in your life? Have you connected with them? We’re talking about persons with whom you are in contact more than just occasionally or haphazardly, about persons with whom you have interactions on a more long-term basis, who are (very) present in your life. At this level, you look at the quality of the relationships you entertain with these other persons in your life. How do they approach you, approach themselves, and life’s events in general, and how do you approach them?
The aim here is not to quickly push away and out anyone who differs in opinion or says something you consider unpleasant or triggers you. The aim is to understand how that person stands in life in general, towards you in particular, and how you stand towards him or her. The reason is that how they do that and how you do that affects you and the kind of life you lead.
You can go, “Yeah, well, what about my partner, my kids, my mother, my father, my in-laws, my colleague(s)??” and possibly you have some more people in mind of whom you’d say, “I have no choice now, do I?”. You do have the choice about how much of your life’s time you spend with them, okay, except for your partner and children. You can only analyze for yourself whether or not what the other brings to your life is valuable (enough) to you. It’s not about using people; it’s about seeing and appreciating, or not, what they add to or take away from your quality of life. It’s not “me, me, me” but “we, we, we” and what that “we” brings you at the end of the day. The people in your life are great mirrors to see what you feel and think about yourself and, yes, about what you believe you are allowed to expect in your life, especially through what they trigger in you (see levels 2 and 7).
What do the people in your life tell you about you?
Choose wisely who you spend your time with, keeping it as clean as possible at this level as well.
“You are what you eat,” “and who you associate with”;
5. Do you truly understand the creative power of your words?
Words create. They can heal, and they can hurt. Words can be the cure, and they can be the venom.
Which ones do you use most in your interactions with other people and with yourself? We all talk to ourselves a lot.
This is the “Creative hygiene” level, which is about keeping the words you utter and those you mumble as clean as possible. This isn’t about being an angel. This is about knowing that the words you speak carry a certain frequency, a vibration, or a vibe, which can be beneficial to yourself and others or detrimental. You choose. I think it is clear which ones will be the more “hygienic” ones. Twenty years ago, I read the book by Don Miguel Ruiz ‘The Four Agreements, A Toltec Wisdom Book’, and the first agreement is very relevant for this level, emphasizing here that you are human, you don’t need to be a saint, and this concerns a goal to strive for, to the best of your willingness & ability:
“Be Impeccable With Your Words” as impeccable as you can be;
6. Why you should also keep yourself balanced on the energetic level
The energetic hygiene layer, I confess, is one you cannot check for yourself at this point, at least.
I am not aware of any affordable tools that would allow you to measure, by yourself, the state of your being at this level. I am talking about your electromagnetic (sig)nature. You see, you are a being of matter, which is made up of energetic particles; in other words, you are energy like in Einstein’s famous equation “E=mc² ”(energy equals mass multiplied by the speed of light squared).
Your being has magnetic properties, and your nervous system, for example, runs on the principles of positive and negative electrical charges, like batteries do. As science has revealed, where there is magnetism, there is electricity, and vice versa. The two are closely related, and they are active in your body. You are as much an energetic system as a body of matter.
I got rid of my migraines using this level, which is linked with dietary hygiene (see level 1), as food and drink items also carry a certain electromagnetic charge and affect your body and its overall electromagnetic charge. I, for example, was too negatively charged overall and rebalanced it with a change of my dietary habits. I write about my experiences in this respect in my book “In You, You Should Trust,” available here.
I look forward to a future where this part of our being is brought into the health equation. At present, the state of this level of your being can only be assessed using computerized analyses.
Always bear in mind that you are not “just matter”, you are also very much energy;
7. Both negative and positive thinking require the same effort, but their impact differs
Mental hygiene is the best-known level for most, the level of the thoughts you entertain.
It is the level that has an important effect as good as all of the other levels, i.e., the physical (level 1), the emotional (level 2), the self (level 3), the social (level 4), and creative (level 5) levels.
The theory for this level is widely known, i.e., to entertain no thoughts that do not serve you, that carry what we label negative connotations, that add nothing to the quality of your life but rather diminish it. The theory is widely known and pretty simple; it’s the practice that proves so much harder for so many. There is no miracle pill for this. You have to look and find the technique, the “miracle practice”, that works for you in enabling you to be(coming) the observer of your thoughts, preventing you from identifying yourself with them, and allowing you to let thoughts be just that: “just thoughts”. No false promises. That technique will require your practice, practice, practice. Meditation is not for everyone, so I will skip that technique. What worked for me was visualizations, where you practice visualizing and observing your thought(s) of the moment as a soap bubble or whatever it is that you can blow or burst away. You can visualize a river in your mind and throw the thought of the moment in it for it to flow away. You get the picture, whatever helps you to separate yourself from the thought, to become an observer of it, and have it move on as you wish. This will also help you to come back to the moment, to the now, every time you catch yourself getting stuck in your mind, having whole conversations, or thinking up all sorts of scenarios for your life.
You can also practice shifting your centre of attention from your cerebral brain to the lower parts of your body, especially bringing that centre of attention to and in your heart area and staying there.
I explain this in my video.
Your mind is a fantastic tool, but it’s a terrible master. As the Bhagavad Gita put it:
For the one who has mastered the mind, the mind is the best of friends; but for one who has failed to do so, his or her very mind will be the greatest enemy.
That quote ends this article’s checklist.
You start with the level that needs the most work done according to your honest self-analysis and take it from there. By all means, go to physiotherapy, osteopathy, or shiatsu sessions, to breathwork, emotional release or mental coaching sessions, to personal training or nutritional advice sessions, and so on, but always keep in mind that the real work is done by you for you, ideally on all of the seven levels.
Doing so will turn you into your own best life coach.
If you would like further guidance on becoming your best life coach, you can read my book, “The Ultimate Guide to Self-coaching,” or book a coaching session here.
Read more from Manu Legein-Vandenhoeck
Manu Legein-Vandenhoeck, Personal Development Coach
Manu is a personal development coach trained in a wide range of different techniques. He used to suffer from very painful, nauseating migraines. He found healing for those in the electromagnetic nature of pretty much all that is created, including the human body and what we eat and drink. This set him on a years-long journey in which he developed and expanded upon his Self-realisation knowledge and know-how.
He started up his coaching practice in 2018, abiding by the motto that two things in our life will never lie to us: our body and our life’s circumstances, including the people in those.
His aim: have you become your own best life coach, and that way an informed and conscious, “awakened”, co-creator of your life.
