Tag: ikigai

Renew Your Mental Energy: Awaken Awareness and Purpose This January

Published on by Nikken

The first month of the year carries a special significance as a new beginning. It also serves as an invitation to pause, reset, and consciously choose how to move forward. While the new year is often associated with goals and resolutions, the most meaningful renewal begins with awareness—of your intentions and ikigai.

Mental energy is crucial to staying balanced, so it is important to replenish it throughout the day. Constant noise, the pressures of familial and financial responsibilities, as well as emotional overload can deplete mental energy. This January, why not consciously choose to reconnect with intention and purpose?

Renewing mental energy starts with awareness. What replenishes vs. drains you? When do you feel the calmest and most restored? Awareness helps you to recognize patterns that don’t work and consistencies do. Do you have a habit of overcommitting? Do you try to accomplish too many things at the same time and thereby get very little done? Are you reacting rather than choosing? Becoming aware of your own behavior allows you to create space and energy. January is an ideal time to ask yourself some basic questions that will serve to renew your mental energy and provide the positive movement you want:

  • What deserves my mental energy this year?
  • What am I ready to let go of from the past so I can move forward this year?
  • What can I do to feel good every day?
  • When do I feel the most empowered and how can I maintain that strength?

Awareness is not just about taking action; it is also about getting enough rest. Mental renewal is not about doing more; it’s about doing what matters and leaving space for rest. Moments of stillness, reflection, movement, gratitude, and meaningful connection all help recharge the mind. Perhaps counterintuitively, slowing down is what helps to regain the focus needed to move forward with purpose.

As 2026 begins, why not try setting an intention rather than a resolution? An intention rooted in awareness evolves, whereas a resolution is static, perhaps the reason so many resolutions fail by February, because they no longer serve their original purposes. Whether your intention is clarity, balance, growth, or peace, let it help make the right choices throughout the year.

Renewing your mental energy is a practice in line with mindfulness and feeling good every day. By awakening awareness now, you practice empowered living. You choose to live with purpose. and remember, take deep breaths and hydrate every single day: two simple acts that help renew mental energy!

Happy new year of 2006! May it be your best year yet!

Do You Practice Empowered Living?

Published on by Nikken

At Nikken, our mission is to empower individuals with the means to create a naturally healthy life while reaching financial stability. We believe the key to physical, mental and financial well-being is “empowered living.”

Empowered living entails making good choices and decisions and then taking action. Doing so consistently and mindfully leads to personal growth and prosperity. The next step is to contribute positively to local communities, then to society at large. Empowered living is a pathway for individuals to connect not only to their immediate environments but also to the world.

Achieve a balanced lifestyle that is full of vitality with empowered living. Put in the simplest terms, our ongoing goal is to feel good every day. We believe feeling good every day is attainable with these five key principles:

•          Enhance your mindset.

•          Boost your vitality.

•          Strengthen your relationships.

•          Make a contribution and serve others.

•          Diversify your sources of income.

These principles are akin to living with purpose. In Japanese, “ikigai” actually means living with purpose. To know our purpose in order to be of value to families and communities, we must know what fulfills us and gives us joy, and then to pursue it.

Here are 10 behaviors to put into motion for ikigai or empowered living:

1.         Awaken your consciousness. Increase your level of awareness to improve your lifestyle. Be open to learning new things.

2.         Connect with your purpose: Understand and pursue the meaning and value you bring to your life.

3.         Choose joy: Choose to be happy and savor each moment. Be grateful.

4.         Move your body: Incorporate activities that motivate you to move naturally, every day. Stay active in one way or another. Get in shape and stay in shape.

5.         Recharge your batteries: Increase energy levels by ensuring restful sleep, connecting with nature and breathing consciously. When you increase your vital energy, you naturally decrease stress.

6.         Practice smart hydration: Consume pure, high-quality water.

7.         Practice smart nutrition: Eat natural, organic and nutritious foods. Don’t eat too much, leave a little room for optimal digestion!

8          Nurture your relationships: Foster love, shared goals, mutual support and connection. Surround yourself with friends and positive thinkers.

9.         Transform your environment: Connect with communities, understand their needs and offer help.

10.       Diversify your finances: Explore various income sources and manage your finances wisely.

Empowered living means consciously living your best life, one day at a time, resulting in not just a long life, but a well-lived life of purpose and meaning.

Is Ikigai the Way to Happiness?

Published on by Nikken

The concept of ikigai is believed to have roots in the health and wellness principles of traditional Japanese medicine. This traditional approach claims that physical well-being and mental-emotional health are tied together to form each individual’s life purpose. Japanese psychologist Michiko Kumano explains that ikigai is a state of well-being that arises from devotion to one’s enjoyable activities, those that bring a sense of fulfillment. In other words, pursue what you love and are passionate about. And if you happen to be adept at what you pursue and are passionate about, you’ll have achieved the three basic tenets of ikigai, which lead to joy.

Ikigai has been likened to the French concept of raison d’être—reason for being, or the purpose of existence.

Ikigai translated poetically can mean “waking up to joy” or “a reason to get up in the morning.” Engrained in Japanese culture is the concept that everyone has an ikigai—a combination of passion, talent and potential to help others—but each individual has to find it. Finding one’s ikigai can take a lot of time and effort, and everyone’s path varies.

Just as the ancient Japanese concept of ikigai is now trending in the western world, recent positive psychology research has suggested an approach to happiness that is similar. It introduces passion as a way of life, or more specifically, “the passionate way of being.” This passionate way of being creates positive emotions and happiness, high energy levels, a sense of freedom and the feeling of flexibility in life choices.

Research suggests that there are five key behaviors to living life with passion:

1. Live according to your values and beliefs. Be true to yourself. Make time for things that are important to you.

2. Think positive and think about the difference you want to make. Focus on your purpose and approach what you do with it in mind.

3. Consciously make an effort to evolve and grow. Learn, improve and expand your knowledge and skills. Constant learning will light the passion within you. Learning is associated with fulfillment and happiness, linked together by passion.

4. Find people who think similarly to you. They are most likely to encourage and motivate you, just as you will inspire them. When it comes to passion, there is strength in numbers.

5. Identify your natural skills. Nature gave you certain gifts—if you can be passionate about them and take action—whether it’s music, mathematics, art or ecology, etc.—happiness will follow.

It’s human nature to want to feel happy and to seek happiness. You learn from infancy that no one can be happy 24/7. And with any emotion, you can’t truly experience the up side unless you also know the down side. So, happiness requires some amount of unhappiness. Since unhappiness cannot be avoided, as mere humans are only partially in control of their emotions, perhaps the best way to cope is to see what you can learn from the down side and how it can help you evolve into a more passionate person, living with purpose and joy.

The Nikken Summer Challenge may be the ideal time to find your ikigai!

Sources:

http://www.positivepsychology.com/ikigai/

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-path-to-passionate-happiness/201404/can-you-find-happiness-through-passion