I was ass at math in high school.

Numbers just didn’t work well with me.

So I came up with my own kind of equation,

One that made a bit more sense to me intuitively.

A spiritual equation is a loose term I use to describe the combined mental, emotional, and spiritual aspects of a person. And how these factors influence the way we navigate through the world.

It’s my way of saying

“It’s complicated, but there’s a solid reason WHY it’s happening this way. And it has to do with, not just your material life conditions, but also your psyche, spirit, beliefs, thoughts, info-diet, and trauma.

The Law of Cause and Effect states:

That for every cause, there is an effect.

A spiritual equation is pattern recognition, that includes the nonphysical causes of effects (outcomes) in our lives.

It’s the “math” of the nonphysical.

Why I Call It That

I call it a spiritual equation because it lets me break my human experience down into parts.

It’s made up of 3 areas with different components:

1. Mind (cognitive biases, mental models, heuristics, beliefs)

2. Heart (emotions, trauma, relationships)

3. Soul (culture, upbringing, spiritual structure)

There are many more,

but for brevity these are the core 3.

These components either give you access, or limit access, to things like:

• Joy
• Love
• Health
• Wealth
• Harmony
• Belonging
• Fulfillment
• Destruction
• Etc.

It could look something like:

Spiritual Equation = Mind + Heart + Soul → Outcome

Or maybe more specifically,

Trauma(a) + upbringing (b) + mental model (c) + cognitive biases (d) + environmental circumstance (e) + food (f) + the music you listen too, the movies you watch, your culture, ethnic background = desired and/or undesired outcome

Not Just a Math Problem

Most of us are trying to figure out life like it’s a spreadsheet.

But some problems aren’t just material.

Sometimes, you’re dealing with a spiritual equation.

Sometimes you don’t just need a better strategy.

You need:

• Better thinking
• Trauma healing
• More movement
• More aligned values
• Emotional awareness
• Environmental changes
• A deeper level of self-awareness

And ultimately, when you get better at solving spiritual equations, you make better decisions that don’t just come from your intellect, but come from your whole being in its totality.

Thought: most people rely on logic equations for decisions making and critical thinking. But they miss the spiritual discernment skills found in tradition.

I purport this is why 72% of the world today in 2025 is under authoritarian rule. Because spirit (as I’ll define later), has been removed from the critical thinking and decision-making process in leaders.

How to solve spiritual equations

To start, you can use mental models, cognitive biases, heuristics,

Take the Meyers Briggs Test or Human Design Analysis.

Or even a astrology natal chart if that suits your fancy.

The Pieces of The Puzzle

For context,

Back in 2023 I realized made some really sh*t decisions: My choice in my romantic partner, in my business, my content creation, and I felt like my whole life was being ripped to shreds.

During that time, I completely shut down and disappeared from friends and family. I’d sleep during the day and stay awake at night because that’s when I felt the safest, cause nobody could reach me.

And during that time,

I do what I usually do: read, think, sit with the pain, and try to find answers.

I said to myself, sniffly, on my knees..

Fetal position full stop,

“Why am I making all these bad decisions? How do I NOT make bad decisions?”

I read. And watched podcasts. And read articles. And subscribed to newsletters and blogs.

And then I found these 3 ideas that changed my life.

Mental Models

I was first introduced to this concept by Naval Ravikant and Charlie Munger. (They operate under the pure-capital framework)

Mental models are the underlying frameworks or structures that guide our thinking and understanding of the world.

They cover the blind spots in our thinking.

“And the models have to come from multiple disciplines because all the wisdom of the world is not to be found in one little academic department.” — Charlie Munger

Cognitive biases

Daniel Kahneman defines a cognitive bias as a systematic error in judgment that arises from the way people think, particularly through the use of mental shortcuts or heuristics.

In other words, our blind spots that trip up our critical thinking.

Heuristics

Heuristics, or cognitive shortcuts, or rules of thumb that we use to make quick judgments or decisions.

Belief Systems

Also known as BS

It gets easier with time

The more you understand your mental, emotional, physical, and spiritual components, the faster you get at solving spiritual equations.

You’ll start to catch the limiting beliefs.

See the inherited trauma.

Name the pattern before it happens again.

If you can upgrade the quality of your mental models, heal emotional blind spots, and rewire the spiritual blueprint you inherited, you’ll make better decisions. Faster. With more freedom.

How I use the spiritual equation mental model

I use this lens when thinking about macro-systems too.

For example in my decolonization journey, someone commented on my YouTube channel, they asked: if authoritarianism is all bad.

This mental model allows me to say, “It depends.”

After studying some lectures from Lee Kuan Yew, the former Prime Minister of Singapore who turned Singapore from a third-world country to a first-world country

I realized:

In order for developing countries to break free from economic, social, and spiritual dependency on the West, they may need a different blueprint than the West itself.

The Philippines is one of the most successful cases of colonization in mind, spirit, and culture. We became what Lee Kuan Yew feared: a pseudo-Western nation.

We copied U.S. democracy, but not its original trauma.

When Americans wrote the Constitution in 1787, they were reacting to monarchy. They feared strong rulers because they’d suffered under King George II of England.

So they weakened executive power and built checks and balances with its three-branch system of government.

Western democracy was formed out of escaping monarchy.

But that’s not the spiritual equation of a postcolonial nation.

A country recovering from 400 years of colonization, genocides, cultural, and historical erasure doesn’t fit the spiritual equation of Western democracy.

LKY, argues that postcolonial nations must reconcile imported institutions with indigenous /cultural values, or they’ll collapse under the weight of unresolved contradiction.

In the Philippines, because of our cultural DNA of Kapwa (a relational, shared sense of self) it kinda malfunctions as a national psyche of people-pleasing.. absorbing and accommodating colonial impulses with a smile.

Its people are too forgiving of bad leaders like Marcos and corrupt family oligarchies.

To navigate the complexities of neo-colonialism – it needs strong executive government to, in a sense, put its foot down against the “overbearing parent” (the west) to reclaim its land, culture, heritage, values, etc. through a decolonial lens to actually gain sovereignty.

Especially against oppositional tactics used by the west like Jakarta Method techniques of the 1960s that attacked any such attempts in the global south with “anti-communist” rhetoric.

All this to say,

Being able to look at problems both from a micro and macro scale through the lens of the spiritual equation empowers you to see deeper dimensions of issues to find deeper dimensions of solutions.

It empowers you to ask better holistic questions.

To find more holistic answers as to how you want to design your life.

Now pause. What’s one recent outcome you didn’t want?

What might your spiritual equation have been in that moment?

What mental models were you using?

What cognitive biases were you unaware of?

What heuristic did you use to make your decision?

I’d love to hear what spiritual equations you’re noticing in your own life.

~ Akino