Getting Back To ToddTalks--Spirit By Design: Building Courage, Faith, and Daily Revelation

After a year break I am returning to a new robust ToddTalks with a clear focus on spiritual wellness, laying out a practical path to hear God, build courage, and act with conviction in a noisy world. I'll share both spiritual and temportal tools like meditation, movement, and visualization to calm the mind, deepen faith, and make daily revelation normal. This episode I cover these ideas which will be the focus of this year's shows as I get back to weekly posting.

• Shifting from five pillars to a single focus on spiritual wellness
• Defining a personal vision for a robust spiritual life
• Using meditation, breath, yoga, and movement to quiet the mind
• Listening after prayer to recognize promptings
• Overcoming fear as a control mechanism
• Building moral courage through small, daily actions
• Seeking truth amid technology and AI
• Keeping kernels of truth from other traditions while guarding agency
• Treating revelation as a daily muscle with review and action
• Simple weekly plan and commitment to consistent episodes

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Transcript

Return And New Focus

SPEAKER_00 0:01

Welcome to Todd Talks, Spirit by Design, where I help you design the spiritual life that you desire. I know, it's been about a year since the last time I recorded an episode, and I'm excited. I'm excited because I finally have my office. We moved into a new house several months ago. I got my office set up, have my recording system set up on the desk so that I can finally once again talk to you and share with you my insights, the things I'm learning, and hopefully provide you with tips, tricks, ideas, and ways to improve your spiritual life, improve your relationship with your Heavenly Father, with God. I'm excited to be back because I I've really missed talking to y'all. Now I don't know you, the majority of you that download these episodes. I don't know you, but hopefully you're getting to know me.

From Five Pillars To Spiritual Wellness

SPEAKER_00 1:07

Uh, if you've gone back and listened to all my Todd Talks episodes, I really enjoyed doing the multifaceted Todd Talks, kind of like TED Talks, where I discussed the five pillars of wellness, as I call them: mental, physical, emotional, spiritual, and financial well-being. But I felt a little over a year ago the need to change to just one single topic, one niche area. And I chose spiritual wellness because that is one, it's an area that I am extremely familiar with. I'm I feel one of the areas that in my life I've been blessed with is the desire to listen and follow the promptings of the of the Holy Ghost of our Heavenly Father. The promptings that he has given me in my life have brought me much success and and both in my personal life and in my work life. And I attribute so many of the adventures that I've had in life to listening to the Spirit, following the promptings that I get and acting on them. I've discussed this multiple times on multiple podcasts, the fact that when we listen, pray, listen, and act, we then receive more personal revelation. So I'm excited to be back talking to you, and we're going to discuss a lot of different things.

Tools To Hear: Meditation And Movement

SPEAKER_00 3:03

In church, we're studying the Old Testament, and we'll go over many of the lessons that I learned from that scripture study. Additionally, I'm going to bring in some of the things that I used and learned from doing the Todd talks because so much, so many of the lessons, but the techniques and things that I learned for the other principles of well-being are applicable to your spiritual well-being. Things such as the law of attraction, meditation, yoga, visualization. These are things that can be used in the spiritual side to basically calm your mind and open your spirit to be able to learn to listen and hear. Because that's the key.

Defining A Personal Spiritual Life

SPEAKER_00 4:13

So many times do you find yourself talking at God, but not necessarily listening to see if he's talking back? We make lots of questions, we make lots of prayers, we do and say many things, but do we listen for a response? So as you try to develop your spiritual life, you have to think about it in these terms. What do I want? What does it look like? What does a robust spiritual life look like for me? And everybody's answer is different. For some, it may be that you never miss a day of church. You're reading your scriptures daily, you have prayer night and day, and at every meal, and you are doing the actions of a spirit, what you consider a spiritual person. For another, it might mean meditating, being still, being calm, spending the time delving into yourself to listen. What awareness, what awakenings is the spirit doing in your soul? Still, for somebody else, it's a mixture of the two. For somebody else, it's the calm tranquility of nature. Practicing yoga and using movement to find. Movement is so important, and I'll be talking about that a lot because movement, exercise, it all goes along with calming your mind and body. It's a mind-body connection that influences your spiritual life. If your body is falling apart, if your mind is chaotic, you're gonna find that your spiritual life is chaotic, or that you will not be receiving the answers or the revelation that you are desiring. So we're gonna talk about a lot of different things. Not today, but in upcoming episodes, we're gonna talk about a lot of different things. Why? Why is it so important now to focus on your spiritual life?

Why Spiritual Strength Matters Now

SPEAKER_00 7:09

Well, let's look at what's going on in the news, in the world. You have a world that is crumbling. The Western world is crumbling. I'm not gonna sugarcoat things. The West turned its back on God, chose secularism, and now many of the Western European countries have been invaded. They've opened their borders to migrants. And I'm not going to get into political discussion about migration or any of that. But what I can tell you is that the mass migration from non-European countries to European countries is changing the culture in many of those countries. It's changing the makeup of the very people that live there. The same thing's happening in many parts of the U.S. And what is increasing, this is the data proves this, is in the West, in the US, crime has been on the rise. Social mores were such that people lost their morality to such an extent over the last several years, last thirty years or more, that the idea of a revival of Christianity is driving parts of the country nuts. But Christianity is needed. Morals are needed. The Ten Commandments are needed. America is built to be a for a god-like people. It is not built for a godless people. And so you see all the problems going on. The world is in chaos. And we recognize that if you read the Bible, we are in the last days. We are in the preparation time, the end of times in preparation for the second coming of the Lord. And because of that, things are going to get bad before they get better. There's going to be a bigger divide between believers and non-believers. It's just the way it is. There will be a distance between those that believe and those that do not believe. And that gap is going to be such that there will be persecution. And you have to be ready for it. You have to stand strong. You have to have a testimony of what you believe to such an extent that when the fiery darts of the evil one, fiery darts of the devil, the persecutions, the winds of change, the fiery winds, and as we have talked about in the past, the furnace of affliction. I know I haven't called it that before, but that's the best way to put it at the moment. All of these things are going to come to pass. The world's going to get worse before it gets better. But you can change and be strong in your part. You can be strong in your home, in your workplace. You can have the spirit around you so that the one thing that Satan and all the world tries to control everyone with will have no effect on you, and that is fear. Fear is the big killer. Fear is the control mechanism of the world. Fear is the control mechanism of the devil.

Fear As A Control Mechanism

SPEAKER_00 11:19

Fear has been utilized a ton since the COVID pandemic, as they called it, in 2020. Fear was used to shut down the world. Over a virus, a flu virus, essentially. Fear is used to control. So how do you build strength of testimony, strength of heart, strength of spirit to overcome fear? How do you stand up for what is right? There's a big difference between watching something that you know is wrong going on and holding up your phone and recording it to stepping in and helping or preventing that same negative thing from going on. Are you going to be the bystander that watches somebody walk off a subway or a bus after stabbing somebody? Or are you going to step in and detain

Courage, Action, And Moral Clarity

SPEAKER_00 12:36

that person and help out and risk getting hurt yourself? These are the things that you have to ask yourself. What is the right thing to do? What is right? What is good? And all this requires you to have a spirituality, a strength of spirit to know right from wrong, to know when to act and when to stand up. Because if the good people of the world, the good people in the US, don't stand up for what is right, and allow a minority, a very vocal and angry minority, to try to control the narrative. If we allow that, what are we? We're just like all the Jews that said, let the we want Barabbas, we want Barabbas when they offered the difference between Christ and Barabbas to be set free. Barabbas the murderer was set free, and Christ the innocent Savior was hung on the cross. Are we going to be those that clamor for Barabbas, or are we going to be those that stand with Christ? That takes courage. So this year, the focus of Todd Talks, design your, not design your best life, that's what it used to be called. Todd talks,

Daily Revelation In A Tech-Driven Age

SPEAKER_00 14:31

your spirit by design, or spirit by design, the focus is going to be on building courage, building faith, building your testimony, building your spiritual life to such an extent that you receive and act on revelation daily. Personal revelation from your Heavenly Father to you, helping you to know what you should be doing and how you should be acting, where you should be living, what you should be, what job you should be doing. Because let's face it, with AI and the amazing technology that is coming forth, it will be near impossible to discern truth from lie, fact from fiction. Near impossible without the help of the Spirit. The prophet on the earth today has said more than once over the last several years that we will be unable to function in these last days without the without personal revelation helping us to know what is true from what is false. So that's what we're gonna do. We're gonna talk about that. I hope you tune in, I hope you listen. We're going to give you ideas, tips, tricks, techniques to build your spiritual life, to build your testimony.

Truth Everywhere, Discernment Required

SPEAKER_00 16:13

You know, a long time ago, I gave a talk and I actually brought uh the teachings of Buddha into it, and people would were like, whoa, whoa, how are you using the teachings of Buddha? There's truth in everything, but there's also lie. So the key is when studying philosophy, when studying other teachings outside of religion, take those kernels of truth and bring them in to understand the gospel better. And we're gonna we're gonna utilize a little bit of everything to hopefully understand and grow together so that your spiritual life can improve, my spiritual life can improve. And together we'll be able to withstand the fiery darts of the evil one who wants to drag us down to hell and make us into his

Agency, Growth, And Next Steps

SPEAKER_00 17:21

slaves. Because that's all all of these ideologies, if you look at the root, it makes everybody slaves to the few powerful, and that's what Satan proposes. His original proposal in the Council of Heaven, which got him kicked out of the council of heaven, was that he would bring everybody back, he would force them to do what's right through fear, through power, through manipulation. And God said no. I give man agency, I give man the ability to choose right from wrong. Because in choosing right from wrong, we develop and grow. When being forced to do things, we don't grow. We stay stuck where we were. So stick with me. I will hopefully, my plan is to make these weekly again, and to get back to every week a new episode comes out, share it with your friends, leave five-star reviews to help with the algorithm. But most importantly, take what you learn, put it into practice, and design the life that you desire. Design the spiritual life you desire. Because, as I said at the beginning and as it is titled, this is your spirit by design. Until next week, take care.