Mind-Manual

What is Conscious Living?

Consciousness/awareness or living consciously is a very, very central concept in Personal Development and perhaps one that people ignore. The essence of it is to make conscious choices rather than making those choices unconsciously, due to habit, or letting someone or something else make those choices for you. Conscious living is based fundamentally on a sense of personal responsibility.

“Everything in your life is a result of your previous choices, whether conscious or unconscious, and thus, everything in the future will be a result of the current and future choices, conscious or unconscious.”

Go back and read the previous sentence carefully. Notice how you feel when reading it. Do you go, “Damn straight!” Or do you skim through it quickly because you don’t really want to read it. Or do you resist it and say, “no, there was a whole bunch of that stuff that I couldn’t control that happened to me.”

The first response is an example of fully accepting responsibility for your life. The second is starting to get there. You’re uncomfortable with the idea. But you’re reading this, so that’s a good sign that you will probably progress to the first response and agree with the statement above. If the last response was yours, then you’ve probably already stopped reading this and you are denying your power in life.

Conscious living, is, essentially, making conscious choices about your life. Did you consciously decide to watch that tv show when you got home from work/school? Or did you just come home and plop down in front of the TV without thinking about it. Do you think you could think of something better to do than watching TV or that particular show? Something more enjoyable, even. Is your life running on an unconsciously-set autopilot?

How about the job you have now, or the people you spend the most time with, or why you’re in school? Did you make conscious decisions based on the merits of each one, or did you simply “go with the flow” or went where the wind blew you? Are you sure that’s the most effective way to live life?

How’s about your money, do you spend it consciously, or do you find it seems to just bleed away when you aren’t looking? This doesn’t mean watching every penny, but do you really know where your money is going? Have you consciously setup boxes of expenses and put aside some money for investing and saving for the future?

Digging deeper, what about some of your beliefs. Do you believe rich people are all greedy and immoral? Did you consciously choose that belief based on interactions with rich people? Or did someone just impose that belief on you when you were too small to be able to critically judge it?

Acceptance of personal responsibility, like I said before, is part of the essence of conscious living. It is recognizing that this is YOUR life and that if YOU don’t do something, it just ain’t going to get done. You won’t magically end up rich and successful. Sure, there’s luck, or people in better positions, or what have you, but there’s also people who are in much worse positions than you who rose to accomplish great things. It is accepting that anything another human being with your abilities can do, so can you! And that is highly empowering.

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Where did you learn to be so fearful?

Lately, I’ve realized just how much people have the ability to convince themselves of just about anything. Even me. Perhaps, especially me. One of the things I think about is how I learned to be so fearful and I saw an answer yesterday in the subway.

A family with four children got onto the subway and one of the sons wanted to look out the window while the subway train was moving. So his dad took him to the door to look out into the black tunnel. The boy put his hand on the door but his dad pulled him back and said, “Be careful, if the door opens you’ll fall out.”

The father was simply trying to be protective, but it makes little sense to me. It is simply an irrational fear, for a few reasons:

1. Trains have safeguards put in place to prevent doors from opening just randomly while its moving and in the middle of a tunnel.

2. The next station would open the doors opposite to the ones they were standing at. Even if the father didn’t know that, it doesn’t make a lot of sense.

3. The dad was there, holding onto him and all the child did was put his hand on the door. He didn’t lean on it or anything. The father could have simply pulled him back.

The child then stayed back from the door, probably a little afraid. I remember thinking, “That child may have just been relegated to a life of mediocrity and being controlled by fear.”

Recently, I’ve been reading Feel The Fear and Do It Anyway by Susan Jeffers. In it, her first assertion is that all fear is a fear that, “I won’t be able to handle it.” When the father says that to his son, he is really saying, “if anything happens to you, I won’t be able to handle it.” And this process, over time, instills a sense of general fear into the son.

I’m not judging or blaming the father. He is, most probably, simply voicing what he learned from his upbringing. I could see that he does genuinely care about his children, especially as he stood there protectively while his wife and children sat down, even though there were seats available for him to sit down.

This story was illustrative because it made me think about where I might have learned my fear-patterns, and it probably does come from my parents. Thankfully, I am now in the position to make conscious choices about what I choose to be afraid of, and choose to make positive changes in my life, both inner and outer.

I’ve also realized I’ve learned a lot of other things from my parents, especially from my mum. I learned how to care about another person very, deeply, for sure. I’ve learned how to be a good person. And I have also learned a scarcity mentality, and I’ve picked up a few unhealthy beliefs about originality that’ve been problematic for me. My parents tried their best and I love and respect them for everything they’ve done for me. I’m also going to try my best. That seems to be the way things go, we all try out best.

Question is, have you thought about where some of your ingrained beliefs have come from? Especially look at what you think is just “common sense”, or feels/sounds “reasonable”. Are they really the most effective things? If you had a child, what qualities would you want to imbue in them? You must have those qualities to give them.

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