More and more I see how important it is to create a new possibility for yourself to get out of the loop of your everyday thinking. To start living a different, better life today than yesterday, our thoughts, emotions and actions have to change. This is very difficult to do because our body is hardwired for a certain way of functioning. We accepted these patterns as who we are from our life to this point. Most of it stems from our childhood, our upbringing and the emotional reactions and dependencies that were geared towards survival at that time.
But if we want to start living a life we went, we have to break these patterns. When you are a kid you are 100 % unconscious. Yes, you are trying to protect your freedom by throwing tantrums but you really don’t have a choice as your emotions guide you completely. Whatever you feel, this is how you behave. When you start growing up, you gain control. And you achieve a certain level of consciousness. Experts say that 95 % of our decision-making is unconscious, the underlying deep-rooted beliefs guide our day-to-day living. But now as adults have an option to take over control of our day-to-day lives.
The day we choose to create new possibilities for our future, we start expanding and increasing our level of consciousness. We just started creating our life instead of just going through the unconscious motions.
We are choosing already to some degree, but probably the majority of forces are still unconscious. For example, why do you want to be rich and successful or why do you want to be a mother and a wife,,..? If we dig through our past, we might very well find very good estimates of what influenced our values and the desires we have in our minds today.
Let’s start creating the possibility of the life we want to live. Who do you want to be? How do you want to live? What do you want to experience? Be specific. The next steps require us to increase our consciousness level day by day, step by step. But we still need to be creating and imagining the possibility we created for ourselves regularly to energize and free us from the chains of our current minds.
In the end, all we are in this life today is just energy, and consciousness with a human body as a tool And we can do whatever we want with this body. We can let it sleep (the unconscious level) or we can take it for a ride (consciousness).
Hopefully, you want to take this baby for a ride;)
Ok, so how do we increase our consciousness level every day so that we can become everything we want to be?
The first thing I would suggest that gives quick results is meditation. Meditation gives us the possibility to return to what matters. To return to what we want to focus on. It gives us the option to make a choice. Whenever the monkey mind starts racing or we are stuck in habitual patterns that don’t serve us, the practice of meditation gives us the power to make a choice.
In everyday life, meditation is returning focus back to a point. It can be the breath, sounds, feelings in your body etc. Practising this skill gives us the power to notice what is happening in our mind and body Where are the thoughts, feelings, and sensations? Is our focus still where we want it? Meditation can be much more than this though. It can also be the medium to free ourselves, to gain the freedom to be and to act. If we start imagining the space around us, how infinitesimally small we are, how we are nothing more than a bit of energy in this whole universe and our consciousness has the power to manage the body and the mind, we become liberated and the world is suddenly at our doorstep.
The second part of increasing consciousness is by recognizing the habitual patterns and stories. Our body is used to reacting to stimuli in a certain way. For example, our mother or grandmother asks us when will we get a girlfriend or get married and instantly a cocktail of emotions overwhelms us and we overreact. Or our friends or siblings make a claim and we start being defensive proving our right. We developed ways of handling ourselves in a certain way to be able to survive our formative years (childhood to early adulthood). By interacting with our parents, caregivers, siblings, teachers, religious leaders etc, we learned to behave in a certain way so we could survive. To survive and not to thrive.
Our parents reacted to our actions in a certain way. If they approved we got a carrot. If they didn’t, we got the stick. Mostly just emotional carrots and stick but it could be even physical. This is how we learned everything in life, this is how we became who we think we are.
We become a program of all the beliefs, all the programming instilled in us when we were growing up. But now we have a choice. There is a world of possibilities for how we want to live. Because we are exactly the same as the famous sports figures, musicians, and businessmen with “amazing lives” that have everything we (think we) want. It’s only that they operate from different beliefs for their whole lifetime. We still have a chance to get to where we want. But it all starts with a choice to do change. The desire to change has to be greater than the desire to remain the same.
PS
Isn’t our Valley beautiful?
