Yes, if your lifestyle is against your spiritual growth, you don't get any spiritual progress. So, you have to make your lifestyle conform more with your spiritual growth. You've got Compassion, each one of you has a certain amount of Compassion. How are you exemplifying that in your normal life? What are you doing in your normal life to exemplify it? You've got a certain wish to have better morality. What are you doing in your normal life to make that morality strong? The Ten Paramis are a great way to look at how your lifestyle is working. Put it under the magnifying glass of each of the Ten Paramis and you may see where you have to change a few things, because it is interfering rather than helping your spiritual progress.
Now, the reason Rosemary and I moved to Thailand sixteen years ago or so, was lack of having good friends in our lifestyle. We had a beautiful farm. It was gorgeous, people couldn't believe we were leaving it. We had turned an old cattle property into four acres of lush grass, fruit trees, vegetables, a house, a workshop, two cars and a ride on mower. It was "great". We were six kilometers away from the nearest neighbor. It was so quiet, you could never hear a car unless they were coming to visit us, because we were at the end of a road. We were at the top of a creek (nobody lived above us) and we had pure water. Not only from the creek, we had rain water. You never heard a plane unless it was the Air Force practicing once every six months. It was extremely rare because we were not in the flight patterns. You couldn't hear the train. One of the locals came and stayed a night with us and said they had grown up there, they were fifty years old, and it was the first time in their whole life they had never heard a train for one day. You couldn't hear the highway, it was too far away.
"Gorgeous", but we didn't have suitable friends and suitable conversation. So, our lifestyle to a certain extent was very good. We practiced as much as we could, meditated twice a day. But we didn't have some of those "suitables." So, moving to Thailand, in particular, was to get those two most important "suitables," suitable friendship and suitable conversation. And in changing that lifestyle our spiritual progress has improved. In fact, it has rubbed off on another few thousand others, too!