How Choosing Conscious Living Creates Inner Peace Every Day
You deserve inner peace.
getty Learning how to live more consciously and successfully is the conundrum of the day.
Living with conscious awareness of what you’re doing, thinking, and feeling isn’t easy. But it's definitely worth the effort.
If you’ve stuck with your commitment to developing this skill for a period of time, you will probably agree — despite the frequent sense of frustration and annoying personal assessment that you’re still not doing it very well.
One of the major issues too often overlooked in this quest for greater mindfulness, calm, and presence is learning how to deal with the predicament of being both human and divine.
(Please take the term "divine" and give it your own meaning. It's been used here as a reference to the larger mysterious whole that everything seems to arise out of and return to.)
Why is learning how to live more consciously a predicament?
On the one hand, you're born, play, work, love, grieve, and exist in a human body with frailties and irritations, sensations, and passion. On the other hand, you also have questions about what happens before birth and after death.
Are you more than your human existence? What happens when you're able to shift your view from daily struggles to experience a bigger picture?
Because life is simply bigger than your ability to grasp it, try as you might, you may often rely on beliefs to soothe those existential questions.
Still, the mystery of it all — and the question of your place in it — never really seems to go away.
Happiness in two dimensions.
To understand the irritations of being human, you need to realize that there's one basic unfulfilled desire at the heart of human discontent: The desire to have life be the way you want it to be.
Your discontent actually rests in the hands of your desire that wants things to be what they’re not.
Yet, wanting things to be what they’re not is what motivates your dreams. If you don’t put your energies into making your dreams come true, you feel unfulfilled and dissatisfied.
Whether it’s baking a tasty cake, throwing a party for your partner, writing a new song, making the world go green, or inventing the next technological leap, this desire makes you human.
So, how can dreaming for things to be different than they are at this moment in time become problematic?
As a human being, discontent drives your dreams.
Picture yourself as a dream machine designed by Divine Decree to dream. In fact, you cannot not dream.
Your human dimension defines happiness as actualizing your dreams — bringing what isn’t yet real into reality.
You're a spiritual being in addition to a human one.
As a spiritual being, you're defined as a child of a mysterious force, perfect as you are, and resting in Buddha Nature, Christ Consciousness, or Love and Oneness — use whatever fits you.
In effect, the essence of you is ultimately divine and perfect as is. No change needed, and no dreams desired.
Your divine dimension experiences happiness as enjoying the present, "being here now," and going with the flow. This creates a dilemma when you're trying to live more consciously.
How can you be here now and run after your dreams?
The answer is learning how to manage paradox.
Then, you’ll stop trying to get rid of that unpleasant "inner tug-of-war" by chasing the dimension that’s "right" (usually divine) and avoiding the dimension that’s "wrong" (usually human).
When you discover your inner tug-of-war has a vital role to play, you’re free to be present to the moment while you’re paradoxically pursuing your dreams.
Being both human and divine at the same time seems to create some confusing and paradoxical guidelines. You’ve heard them all many times.
But you may not realize how they influence the way you live, make decisions, and try to resolve your dilemmas.
Here are 3 guidelines that can cause great confusion and anxiety when you're learning how to live consciously.
1. Do you keep moving or stay still?
Your human self says, "Keep moving and go after what you want."
Your divine self says, "Stay still and be grateful for what is."
2. Do you focus on the future or the present?
Your human self focuses on the future and expects to get what you want.
Your divine self focuses on the present and delights in letting things be as they are.
3. Do you try to heal your wounds or accept yourself as you are?
Your human self wants you to heal your wounds from the past.
Your divine self wants you to remember that you are perfect as you are right now.
Since you logically can’t do two contradictory actions at the same time, what do you do?
It's a quandary unless you have the wisdom of your discontent to manage these paradoxical directions.
You see, your unconscious mind has to decide which guideline is the right one to follow. It will move you toward the one it thinks is right and away from the one it thinks is wrong.
Here it is again! Your mind will force you to set up what you like against what you dislike.
What do you do in the presence of a dilemma?
Take a minute right now and ask yourself which of the above guidelines your unconscious mind is trying to follow.
How will you know? Simply check out what you think and feel.
Do you believe one is right and the other wrong? Does one dimension seem irrelevant to your happiness?
Do you find yourself desperately trying to move back and forth between the two without any reliable way to decide which to choose? Do you find yourself second-guessing your decisions time and again?
Remember, don’t judge. This is just an investigation. Be lovingly ruthless. No one else needs to know what you find.
Learning how to live more consciously seems to be an ongoing question. You learn something new, a door you didn’t know was there opens, and then the desire for how to live more consciously arises again.
Why does that happen? Because conscious living and conscious leadership tastes so sweet, feels so satisfying, looks so beautiful, and sounds so inspiring.
Ragini Michaels is an author, hypnotherapist, mentor, coach, and International Trainer of Unconscious Communications and Modeling Skills, specializing in Behavioral Change. For more information, visit her website.