Preparing for the Matching
Personal Development
Here you’ll find information about how to develop ourselves with a spiritual lifestyle in mind
A healthy lifestyle means taking care of your physical body with a nutritious diet, exercise and avoiding whatever harms your body, like alcohol or drugs.
It also means taking care of your spiritual growth (with prayer, HDH, etc..) and learning how to love.
It means to have genuine relationships where you feel fulfilled because you are supporting others with your time and your abilities.
Any areas in your life where you find it harder to have self-control such as eating, social media, gaming, masturbation, pornography etc. are habits you need to address now.
Isolation and loneliness can often lead to addictive behaviours* so it’s important to reflect on productive ways to connect with others (family, friends, community) more regularly.
Downloads
Below are two self-reflection exercises: the first one is about discovering which ways are easiest for you to connect to God; the second exercise is about how to live life based on your priorities.
-
My Spiritual Style Survey
These answers aren’t about what you like to do. They are about what you do when you’re connected with God. In other words you can get the most out of connecting with God when you do things based on these styles.
-
Making a Life Plan
Your life plan isn’t set in stone, it’s something that you can continuously come back to and update as life changes.
“The Unification Church teaches about mind-body unity. There is no secret formula. Mind-body unity cannot be achieved by money, or through any means of training or education. It is only possible with true love.”
― Sun Myung Moon
For further reading on
Original Sex
How to live a life of sexual integrity:
Sexual Integrity
Sexual Integrity is a mindset and lifestyle for keeping sexual purity before marriage and fidelity in marriage.
-
– know the REAL purpose of sex from God’s perspective.
The goal for keeping purity isn’t to avoid sex. You’re choosing to stay pure because you want to have the BEST sexual experience possible. God designed our bodies AND God designed sex. Understanding sex from God’s perspective is the best path toward fulfilling sexual experiences with your spouse based on real joy and intimacy.
What is God-centered perspective of sex? It’s rooted in true love, focused more on what you’re giving to your spouse than what you’re receiving from your spouse. This doesn’t happen automatically in a relationship, takes growing and learning to love.
-
– know why sexual integrity is important to YOU.
You need to have your own reasons for why you don’t sext, masturbate, look at pornography etc. It’s not enough just to follow what the church or others say. You should confidently tell people that “I choose not to ______________ because I want _________________”.
When you’re clear and confident about your sexual integrity. You will know how to react when confronted with unwanted situations.
-
– focus on growing yourself to be a better spouse.
Be serious and realistic about how to live a life of sexual integrity. Prepare yourself for:
what to do in unwanted situations: peer pressure, sexting, pornography etc
what to do in marriage: how to grow your heart
All three points are important before and after receiving the Blessing.
The Problem with masturbation
The sexual thoughts often connected to masturbation aren’t teaching you how to treat a sexual partner with love and respect, it’s focused on your own pleasure. Consistent masturbation can ‘imprint’ on your sexual experience. This limits your ability to be aroused in real-life sexual experiences because your mind and body need to mimic the experiences from the past for sex to feel satisfying in the present.
The Problems with Pornography
FAKE – “Porn promises intimacy and satisfaction but leaves us empty and searching for more. Intimacy means being known inside and out and being loved for who you are. God created sex to be the deepest physical expression of intimacy between a man and woman.”*
Pornography is based on lies about what sex is, unreal expectations, illusion. It’s not real but a false portrayal of what sex is.
FALSE LOVE – “The temptation of pornography is to bypass the effort involved in building a relationship. Porn gives us a chance to fantasize and forget about your own imperfections. Even if pornography provided accurate images of women (and it doesn’t), it still only offers an image – not a real person. An image is easier to relate to than a person with a heart, mind and emotions. An image has no expectations. You don’t have to deal with any of the awkwardness that comes with relating to a real person.”*
LEAVES SCARS – It doesn’t magically go away once you’re Blessed. Those images are hard to erase from your mind. If your sexual thoughts are more connected with imaginary sexual ‘objects’ than your spouse, it’s difficult to experience joy and intimacy in your sexual relationship with your spouse.
Reference: “Resisting the Power of Pornography” www.focusonthefamily.ca
