Mastery

The Seven Life Areas is a map and a method for mastering every area of your life. It answers the single most important question that you can ask yourself: ‘How do I live a good life?’ By revealing the patterns of the seven life areas, it becomes possible to gain self-mastery. This is achieved by organizing the human experience into trainable domains and providing a path for integration. The result is a life with alignment, achievement, and purpose.

7 Life Areas

Life can be integrated into seven areas: Body and Relationships, Mind and Heart, Matter and Spirit, and lastly Service. A life area is a dimension of lived experience that requires investment of energy and can be developed through practice. Body and Relationships, Mind and Heart, and Matter and Spirit specifically train skills and capacities, while Service creates integration between them.

Alignment

Developing the areas of Relationships, Heart, and Spirit creates alignment. When you connect more deeply with people and nature, you build strong Relationships. By opening the Heart, you become creative and pursue your dreams. Spirit is last in this triad and fosters your spiritual connection to the divine, beloved, or any other name that resonates.

Achievement

Developing the areas of Body, Mind, and Matter produces achievement. Investing in your Body creates health, and that vitality lifts every other area. Sharpening your Mind brings discernment and clarity into your life. Clear thinking enables you to improve Matter, thereby increasing your wealth and stability. The practical domain, such as your career, housing, and finances practical will create a solid foundation.

Purpose

Your purpose lives in the intersection of alignment and achievement. The seventh area of service develops naturally and cannot be actively developed. Yet, it requires substantial effort to first create the healthy soil of alignment and achievement that is necessary before the service area can grow. Only once this goal of self-development is sufficiently achieved—something life decides for us—the focus changes from oneself to the world. Your gift will then reveal itself, and you’ll bring it into the world as an act of service.

Integration

The goal of seven life areas (7LA) is to orient human life toward alignment, achievement, and purpose. In mapping out the human experience, it aims to show the essentials of each area while maintaining the integrity of the whole. It is both practical and aspirational so you can understand where you stand yet see your potential. Only once each area has been sufficiently developed can the process of integration begin. Becoming more conscious with your mode of operating brings great freedom, as you have the ability to act from the full range of human experience.

These different domains greatly impact you, and a life lived from kinesthetic intelligence (Body), or from your intuition (Heart), or from rational thinking (Mind), produces wildly different results. Often our primary modes of operating are unconscious, so the first step is to become aware. It can be quite a shock to find out you haven’t explored all facets of your life. Figuring out why you haven’t developed certain things is less important than taking action and embracing where you stand. It’s all part of being human.

Although development is desirable, we shouldn’t wish to solve each challenge that presents itself. Not everything is a path of improvement; much of what we need is to change our relationship with life itself. That starts by changing the relationships between the areas of your own life. Life will never be perfect. But your experience needs to orient towards your purpose, which is always to be in service to the greater whole. The how and what looks different for each of us. This requires a compleat[^1] map of your life—not complete in the sense of incorporating all the possible range of activities—but lacking nothing that is not essential for a good life. This can seem like a big claim, but this is merely stating that 7LA is opening a door; you can choose to walk through it.

You need a map

Our society is full of highly differentiated roles—Machine Learning Operations Engineer, Regulatory Compliance Analyst, Colorectal Surgeons—and it can be hard to find common ground, let alone understand all that we need to know in an ever-changing and increasingly complex world. Although a specialist economy yields great rewards, we can’t live and operate our lives from such a limited perspective. The whole garden needs our attention, not just the flower that we ‘like’. The amount of contradictory information is growing by the day, and even the forces within ourselves are often in opposition.

As human beings, we sleep, socialize, work, sing, eat, move, travel, learn, shop, pray, paint—the list is endless. Countless structures through the ages have provided us with direction on how to live and structure these daily activities. Whether it was the church, school, or government, these no longer provide the stability we need to thrive in the 21st century. One could even argue that modern technology has taken this role on itself, but this technocratic mindset has severe drawbacks. We desperately need something that puts us back in touch with life and can facilitate growth and direction for our personal lives.

Seven Life Areas is such a map, as it incorporates the essentials of human experience and provides a way to integrate it. Unlike a rigid framework with set rules and guidelines, 7LA is a journey towards self-mastery. Everyone understands the words Body, Mind, and Heart, but very rarely do we choose to practice these capabilities. Frameworks always come and go, yet they force us to live in a certain way. Take the dichotomy of living as a monk in a Christian versus a Buddhist monastery, or running a business within a capitalist versus a communist society. It is the underlying theory—Christianity versus Buddhism, capitalism versus communism—that gives rise to an entirely different experience. It is therefore important to choose and invest wisely in any framework.

Three steps to self-mastery

Know yourself

Wherever you are, no matter your age, gender, or religion, start to examine each area of your life. The human experience has a certain range, and 7LA merely names the parts. It’s your task to invest in yourself; no one else will do it for you. Once you see where you stand, you can decide where you want to go. Self-mastery is essential, so we must develop the areas we’ve neglected so far. When you make a change in one part, it will affect the whole. So start, no matter how small. The single most important thing is to take that first step.

Find your Gift

After we’ve made some progress, we’ll begin to come closer and closer to our gift. The innate ability of the soul, svadharma, eco-niche—that which we’re meant to be in this lifetime. This will most certainly cover many areas and will change with the seasons of your life. It’s bigger than something you do. And it cannot be defined as one role such as lawyer, mother, or athlete, yet these can be expressions of your gift. Being of service is not glorious, but it will make you fulfilled. It is very much like water[^2]; it fills every form of life, but is only missed once it is gone. Your gift is aligned with a certain need from the collective, and we are the vehicle through which that manifests.

Serve the world

The area of Service is meant to bring harmony between the other six areas. Once we’ve rediscovered our gift and know our purpose, harmony becomes possible. Events that would’ve broken you in the past, such as loss of love, health, and material security, become less severe now that your purpose is clear. On the flip side, the joy of knowing who you are will make you feel very alive. The art that the 7LA aims to cultivate is to embrace your whole self, to let areas come into the light while others pass into the dark. It’s about moving through these different domains with awareness of their relationship and your own direction.

Transform your life

In the end, it’s the compound effect of all that you do that determines the quality of your life, not any given component. Therefore, it is not the goal to get all the pillars of each area right, or to develop any area into perfection. 7LA is meant to be used, cultivated, and internalized. It is both a science and an art. This awareness will change you if you give it the time. To master every area of your life will require effort and patience. But once you see the patterns and make small incremental changes, you can transform your life. You’ll become healthier, sharper in thought, increase your wealth, deepen your relationships, awaken your heart, and connect with the divine. And once you know yourself, your gift can reveal itself, and you will serve the world.