Why Your ‘Why’ Matters: Spiritual Energy (Meaning)

We’ve covered the physical foundation, the emotional landscape, and the mental tools. Spiritual energy or meaning is the topic of today’s blog post.

Spiritual Energy or The Energy of Meaning

Why do you do what you do? Spiritual energy is generated by acting in alignment with your deepest values, and it is depleted when your daily life consistently contradicts what matters most to you.

Viktor Frankl, the psychiatrist who survived the Nazi concentration camps and wrote Man’s Search for Meaning (1959), observed that people could endure almost any suffering if they had a clear enough sense of purpose. Contemporary research supports this across contexts: a strong sense of meaning predicts greater resilience, psychological well-being, and performance under pressure (Damon, 2008; Peterson & Seligman, 2004).

When your actions align with your values, decisions feel easier. When they don’t, everything feels harder.

Why This Matters Specifically for Dancers

People dance because it means something to them, whether that be expression, connection, beauty, joy, or identity.

The teaching schedules, the politics, the social media presence, the money anxiety, and the competitive hierarchies can slowly crowd out that meaning. You find yourself doing the thing you love in ways that feel at odds with why you started.

Spiritual energy depletion often shows up as: “Why am I even doing this?” or realizing you are just “dialing in” (or performing a task with minimal effort) in your performances.

Begin with a Values Clarification

My values are recorded in the “notes” APP on my phone. I refer to them regularly, and have done so for a decade since I first did this exercise. I started by brainstorming with a list of things that are important to me (around 30), then realized I could group them into categories, and ended up with 5 simple, easy-to-remember values. My values are 1- prioritizing friends and family, 2- lifelong learning, 3- aging with joy, health, and vitality, 4- achieving financial security, and 5- promoting social justice. You can’t align with values you haven’t named, so take a moment to consider your big “why”. Here are some reflection questions to help.

• What would I do if no one ever knew or judged my choice?

• When have I felt most proud of myself, and what was I honoring in that moment?

• What am I unwilling to trade away, even for something I really want?

• What frustrates or angers me most in others?

Next comes the difficult part.

Look at how you spent your time last week. Does it reflect what you just wrote down?

The gap between stated values and lived behavior is one of the most reliable sources of chronic energy depletion. I used to be the director of a University Counseling Center, and 80% of what students came in to discuss was some version of this: they were experiencing distress because their current behavior was not consistent with their values. Even a brief 5-minute monthly review of your values can help you align your behavior with them.

Another suggestion to help you align your values and your actions is to enforce a “sleep on it” rule before you say “yes” to something asked of you. This will help you make value-aligned choices. The pause allows you to avoid saying “yes” to please someone, even if it does not align with you. Taking a moment to see whether the new “ask” aligns with my stated values (and how I want to spend my time) almost always makes my answer both easy and obvious.

My favorite technique is to draw a line down the middle of a sheet of paper. On one side, write your values; on the other, write how you spent your time over the last day/week/month. If any of the ways you spend your time don’t align with your core values, consider moving them off the list. After doing this exercise the first time, I quit a non-profit board, I closed a business (The Belly Dance Business Academy), and I left my long-time dance troupe. Ending those energy outlays made space for me to create a dance and personal life I really love, even though it felt risky and sad at the time.

This is the end of the Energy Management section of my book, Mind in Motion. In the next blog, we will learn about one of my FAVORITE topics: Habit Formation and Motivation.

Coming up in Habit Formation and Motivation:

Post 1: Why Motivation Keeps Failing You

   Post 2: The Science of Making Practice Stick

   Post 3: Make Practice Irresistible

   Post 4: When Your Habit Breaks

   Post 5: Become the Dancer You Want to Be

Remember, you are not meant to run on empty. You are meant to move in cycles through stress, recovery, growth, and expression. That is the rhythm of the body, the mind, and the dance. Begin noticing your energy and managing it with intention, and notice what happens. I would love to hear.

References

Clear, J. (2018). Atomic Habits. Avery.

Damon, W. (2008). The Path to Purpose. Free Press.

Fogg, B. J. (2020). Tiny Habits. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

Frankl, V. E. (1959). Man’s Search for Meaning. Beacon Press.

Lally, P., et al. (2010). How are habits formed: Modelling habit formation in the real world. European Journal of Social Psychology, 40(6), 998–1009.

Peterson, C., & Seligman, M. E. P. (2004). Character Strengths and Virtues. Oxford University Press.

Wood, W., & Neal, D. T. (2007). A new look at habits and the habit–goal interface. Psychological Review, 114(4), 843–863.