Namaste For Modern Life

What if a simple bow could reset your whole day—and your trajectory? We explore a clear, grounded practice for modern life: saluting yourself, others, and the world. Not a military gesture, but a psycho-spiritual honoring that helps you move from complaint to gratitude, from isolation to community, and from confusion to purpose.

We start by reframing human life as precious and workable. With palms together, we acknowledge the gift of being born in this form and the responsibility that comes with it. That small ritual interrupts negative programs, steadies attention, and reminds us that growth happens here and now. From there, we turn to relationships. People can give us heaven or hell, and both can be teachers. We talk about building a sangha—like-minded community that multiplies courage—and how friction can become fuel, illustrated by the counterintuitive wisdom of being grateful for setbacks that become catalysts.

Then we widen the lens to the world itself. Do you experience reality as friendly? Not naive optimism, but a stance that the world is a gym for the soul—a place to train attention, compassion, and skill across family, career, creativity, and service. We explore how this view unlocks better choices, cleaner boundaries, and a steadier heart, without denying pain or complexity. To make it practical, we end with a brief namaste practice you can use anytime: honor the self, honor others, honor the world; breathe, bow, begin again.

If this resonates, subscribe, share with a friend, and leave a review so more listeners can find the show. Tell us: what will you honor today?

Transcript

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Welcome And Purpose Of Spirit X

SPEAKER_00 0:07

Hello everyone. Welcome to the episode 6 of Spirit X Podcast. My name is Nicola. I'm an author, philosopher, spiritual teacher, and nonprofit leader. And in this podcast, we are exploring modern day spirituality, but we are also exploring modern life from a spiritual standpoint. So this podcast is designed for spiritual practitioners, but also for a wider audience. We are slightly using my first book, Spirit X Spirituality for the Global and Digital Age, as a kind of guide through this complex yet beautiful terrain. And today we have a great topic, like for every other podcast. So I would like to focus on the chapter or principle number three in the book. Again, it's applicable for spiritual practitioners, but it's also great to apply it in life. So whether you are passionate about spirituality or not, I think this principle and this discussion is important.

Principle Three: Salute Life

SPEAKER_00 1:14

And the title of the principle and the chapter is Salute Yourself, Others and the World. What I mean by salute is more psycho-spiritual honoring and gratitude rather than a militaristic salute. You're probably familiar with the expression namaste. It's very popular in yoga circles in the West, and it comes from Hinduism. It's usually done like this with palms together and with a slight bow, and we do that before yoga practice and after yoga practice. And the literal translation is divine in me honors divine in you, or divine in me acknowledges divine in you, or divine in me recognizes divine in you. But there is this human divine recognition in the human realm, and it's a very, very single gesture. And uh, as I was writing my first book, I was thinking, you know, how can I put people in the right frame of mind so they can grow psychologically and spiritually and life-wise? And I realized if we don't honor human condition, if we don't honor others, whatever they are our experience with with them is, and if we don't honor the world, we are actually setting ourselves for failure in whatever we want to accomplish. But let me start by reading the first paragraph

Honoring Yourself As Precious

SPEAKER_00 2:52

of that principle, and then we'll go from there. So, number three principle salute yourself, others, and the world. Put your palms together, send honoring loving attention to yourself, your birth, and your human condition. Put your palms together, acknowledge others on the path, and send them honoring loving attention. Put your palms together, acknowledge the world in its many perspectives and dimensions, and send it honoring loving attention. So we put our so it's a loving gesture, it's a psycho-spiritual gesture, it can be done with eyes open or eyes closed, and we notice there are three dimensions of human existence. There is myself, there is others, and there is the world. And if we're in a right relationships, honoring relationships with ourselves, others, and the world, we are actually setting ourselves for success and self-realization, etc. So the first dimension we want to explore when it comes to human condition is is ourselves. So I would like to read something about that. So this is a psycho-spiritual take on being in a human form. Honor yourself, your separate human self. Human birth is precious and the result of good deeds and karma. In human relative form, you and all other human beings are given the opportunity to rediscover your absolute formless self, your true self, your true nature. Honor yourself in this precious human form. Cultivate the practice of honoring yourself in the form of bowing, gratitude, visualizations, and whatever practice works for you. So from a psycho-spiritual standpoint, I propose that we take the human birth as a gift, and in that regard is something precious. So it's given to us by universe, by God, how you wanna call it, and we need to make something out of it. So human birth is about soul making in that regard, and it's important to remind ourselves about the game we are playing here in human condition. And we should always remind ourselves how precious it is to be born in the human form and to honor our life. In the present-day world, with social media, with politics, with the victim mentality, a lot of people start complaining about their lives and develop a kind of negative programs within themselves, and then they forget about being thankful and grateful for human experience, and on the long run, those programs don't produce good results and good lives. So I'm not saying that life is fair all the time. No, it's not. It can be difficult, it can be challenging. But if in the background we have this program of honoring human birth and human form, everything is much, much, much easier. So I'm not saying honor your ego, you know, honor good traits and bad traits on your personality. I'm just saying you're born as a human. That's a great game to play. And just remind yourself of that fact on good days, on

Community, Challenge, And Growth

SPEAKER_00 6:39

bad days, during good periods and bad periods. So we honor ourselves in a sense of uh it's great to be born in the human realm. There are other realms, think of hell, think of hungry ghosts, there are better realms, think of gods and stuff like that. But human realm is considered from a spiritual standpoint to be a favorable one. And that's been my spiritual uh intuition and realization. So let's all honor the opportunity to be humans. The second dimension of this human experience is others, and you know how that story goes. Uh we can have great experience with other people, and we can have a very negative experiences with each other. So the truth is that uh you know we need to have the right attitude about others, and here is I would like to lead a uh paragraph about that. Honor others you meet on the path. We are here to help each other find a way back home. At times we do it wisely and lovingly, at times we do it fiercely, and at times we do it clumsily and imperfectly. The point is that we are all in this together. On a deeper level, there is no spiritual growth without a loving and supportive spiritual community. So there is lots in this paragraph. I'll just like to address this this last uh uh sentence. Yes, it's whatever you're trying to accomplish in life, whether to fix yourself or hear yourself and to achieve something, it's important that we surround ourselves with like-minded people. So that's the key. However, that's not an easy task, and sometimes other people do challenge us. As I said, sometimes people give us heaven, sometimes people give us hell, and we need to have the right mindset, you know, how to deal with those sometimes positive, sometimes negative experiences. The bottom line, we all want the same things spiritually. We want to go back to our ultimate home, which I think is the spirit and God, and that was my spiritual realization. However, sometimes we help each other, sometimes we challenge each other, etc. You're probably all familiar who Oprah Winfrey is. Uh she's a TV personality who build a media empire. And in some interview, they asked her, uh, what are you grateful for the most? And she said that the most important thing that happened to her in her life was that when her previous boss fired her from previous position, and that was actually a catalyst for her to build her media empire and to become this larger than life media personality. So oddly enough, Oprah Winfrey, one of the most successful TV personalities ever, is grateful for being fired from her previous work. So she was smart enough to see that that negative experience actually opened other positive experiences in her life. And oddly enough, she's grateful to her previous boss for firing her. So that's a good spiritual intelligence, if you ask me. So something negative is seen as potentially and on a long run, something positive, and that's the right mindset. So sometimes we have a great experience with this person, and that's okay. But even if we are having negative experiences with some persons, that can be turned into an advantage. So again, people give us heaven, people give us hell, but uh on the long run, with the right attitude, we are winning the game of life. Ultimately, we all wanna go back home and we get confused. And don't forget, surrounding yourself with like-minded people is important. Makes everything easier in the circles where I spend time we call that spiritual community or sangha. That's the expression from Buddhism. So that was the others part. And there is the world part.

Seeing The World As Friendly

SPEAKER_00 11:12

Uh from a psycho-spiritual standpoint, I suggest that we see the world as a container in which all of this is happening, with many perspectives and many corners. Uh the world is a place where we work on our soul. Uh which corner you choose, where your soul goes, depends on a lot of factors. You may be focused on family or on career, or you may be environmentalist or spiritual guy like myself or an athlete, whatever. Those are all perspectives within the world. War is the world is a very rich phenomenon. But in the world, the soul is uh seeking its own self-realization and self-actualization. And the key thing there is one very simple question. There is one quote on social media that is associated to Einstein, which is actually not his. And the question is very simple. Do you see the world as a friendly place or not? So again, do you see the world as a friendly place or not? If you're seeing world as a friendly place where you're playing one kind of game, if you're not seeing place as an essential or at least to an extent, friendly place, well, you know, you may develop some programs that are that are uh not comfortable and not beneficial for you and for others. So the way we can see the world as a as an okay place to be, as a positive place to be in is that the the world is a place where we are making our soul, when we are making our lives and stuff like that through various experiences. And in that regard, the world is a terrain, arena where we are training our soul and our spirit for higher frequency. In that regard, the world can be seen as a friendly place, and that's what I suggest from a spiritual standpoint. So the world is a place of soulmaking, and the life is a training of the soul from a psychospiritual standpoint, and when we approach life that way, everything goes smoother, and this approach can be brought in any area of your life, relationship, marriage, career, sports career, journalism, environmentalism, and whatever it's a kind of good attitude in the background. So the world is a friendly place in which we are training our soul,

Three Dimensions Integrated

SPEAKER_00 13:55

and that solves a lot of problems. So three dimensions of human life. So there is I, there is others, and there is the world. We honor those three dimensions, we relax, it's all good. We are training our soul. The world is a gymnasium for the soul. Life is about developing your soul, and we play that game and we bring that frequency to various areas of our life, and that changes everything. I've done that, I helped many, many people doing the same, and the results are true, truly extraordinary. Whatever you want to accomplish with your life. And we usually finish with something experiential for today, something very simple, experiential.

Closing Namaste Practice

SPEAKER_00 14:43

You're going to do just namaste, so namaste, friends, and there is a uh there is a slight bow. The divine in me recognizes the divine in you, the divine in me honors the divine in you. Thank you for watching, thank you for your attention, and I will see you in the next episode. Thank you very much. Bye bye.