Viktor E. Frankl was suggesting conscious awareness when he wrote, “Live as if you were living a second time, and as though you had acted wrongly the first time.”
I hear a lot of people say they would like a chance to live life over again so they could get it right. OK. What do you want to do differently? Write it down. Bring to conscious awareness the unconscious patterns in your life that you want to eliminate. It doesn’t matter if you are 20, 40, 60 or 90 years old. Each moment of life is an opportunity to live life fully.
For example, would you like to change your eating habits? No better time to start than now. What about exercise? Have you been kind to people? If not, stop focusing on it and start being kind.
Do you have regrets that you haven’t educated yourself enough? You can start right now.
The point is this, you don’t have to label yourself based on what you have done or not done in the past. Conscious awareness is about living in the present moment. Whatever gets you to this point is not as important as the fact that here, right now, you are making conscious choices that you will not regret.
I’m amazed at the number of people I have met who used to be alcoholics and now live lives consisting of the highest spiritual values, successful in every way. They have decided to start living differently, as if they were doing it all over. And each and everyone succeeded by connecting to their higher self.
So many of us wish for longevity, but what is more important than that is to live each day fully, to our full potential. Some people live to be 100 years old and have never lived a day fully in all that time. One hundred years of unconscious living isn’t worth one day of conscious awareness.
Forget about the time that you have wasted in the past. That’s done and over. Let’s get it right from here on out. Cherish the moments with your family and friends. Love them as if you weren’t going to live another day. Listen to their words. Watch their gestures. Laugh at their jokes. Suffer in their sufferings.
Living fully in the present will awaken a heart that has fallen asleep from apathy. Conscious awareness brings to life every aspect of our being.
Bringing Conscious Awareness into Life
So how do you bring conscious awareness into your life? You do it by objectively witnessing what is happening. Observe what is happening with your emotions, with your reactions, with your fears, and with your attentiveness or lack thereof.
Your emotions and your fears and your reactions are not who you are. They are passing shows. Instead of saying to yourself things such as “I am afraid,” try saying “Fear is happening right now.” This keeps your ego or false self from attaching to these temporary states of emotion. Likewise, instead of saying “I am strong,” say “Strength is happening.” You observe it. You don’t get attached to it.
This type of self-talk keeps to a minimum fragmentation or differentiation. It keeps us from being hard on ourselves and it also keeps us from being egotistical. But most importantly, it brings consciousness to the foreground.
I find that when someone is using harsh words with me, I don’t have to get entangled with their energy. I just observe what is happening. It’s a very liberating experience to witness myself being verbally abused and not being affected by it. It’s freedom from my reactions. And when I fail to control my reactions, I eventually realize it. Then I just tell myself, “Reactivity is going on.”
It’s a very gentle way to pull myself up from a low energy state of being to one of peace and understanding.
I’ll leave you with these words of Rumi to ponder: “Something opens our wings. Something makes boredom and hurt disappear. Someone fills the cup in front of us: We taste only sacredness.”
