I was driving on a highway recently in a rural part of North Carolina and I passed a young guy, probably early 20’s, who was sitting in the grass very close to the side of the road. This highway was pretty far from any hint of civilization. He was slightly slumped over with dirty clothes on and had a few bags with him.
Seeing him sitting there struck me for many reasons. The first question that bubbled up in my mind was what was he was doing in the middle of nowhere? The second question was how did he get “there”? There being that place in his life where he found himself sitting alone by the side of a road, disheveled and barely coherent.
I thought about this young man for quite some time. Of course I had no way of knowing the answer to either of those questions. I wasn’t judging him for sitting there. Maybe he was content and happy. Maybe he lives by the mantra “Not all those who wander are lost.” I’ll never know because I didn’t stop to talk with him.
What I do know is that a very powerful part of our reality is the ability to see the choices that other people make and to either be inspired by them or to let them serve as a cautionary tale.
Working in the Akashic Records has dramatically influenced my awareness of seeing how choice and consequence play out in our physical world.
The truth is I’m endlessly fascinated by all the nuances of cause and effect that govern our creative process. I spend a lot of time observing the lives that people create for themselves.
The human experience is a conundrum. It’s thick with layer upon layer of complexity (the ‘human being’ part of the equation) while also being extremely simple at the same time (the ‘universal laws and creation through choice’ part).
We are at CAUSE for the quality of our life and our circumstances whether we are aware of that truth or not.
And this is where it gets tricky.
Conscious choice means our awareness is high enough of ourselves and of others that we have access to choice born from free will.
However, most people are not creating through conscious choice. As Carl Jung so eloquently said “Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate…”
The subconscious mind cannot move outside fixed programs. It works by responding automatically to situations with previously stored behavior responses AND without control of the conscious mind.
A lot of people live from their unconscious shadows (around power, worth or need for validation) and from the perpetual patterns stored in their subconscious mind, both from past life and present life experiences.
This is why individuals are often unaware of their own behavior and may not even know that they are acting unconsciously. However if your life frequently looks like a tornado blew through… that should serve as a giant clue!
Drama, dysfunction, addiction, power struggles, disempowerment, self-sabotage and having no sense of direction or purpose – are all pretty good signs that you are not living from a conscious place serving as the Captain of your own Ship.
Turn on any news channel or Netflix series for an up close and personal on what this looks like.
So…how do we become more conscious?
By looking at the second part of Carl Jung’s quote: “Self-knowledge, the understanding of our thoughts and behaviors and their influence on our lives, will make the unconscious conscious.”
The good news – we have so many avenues available to us to do this!
As Gandhi said, our beliefs become our thoughts. Our thoughts become our words. Our words become our actions. Our actions become our habits. Our habits become our values. Our values become our destiny.
We can select any aspect in the chain of movement from belief to destiny and explore the depths of it to see what is really going on behind the scenes.
What do you Believe? The next time you get triggered, it will give you a ton of insight into something you are firmly holding on to as a truth for you. And that belief…may or may not be serving you. Our beliefs literally create the foundation for how we perceive the world. That’s no small thing! Yet how often do we clean house on old beliefs that were never ours to begin with?
What are the Thoughts you give energy to? We like to think of ourselves as being the generator of our own thoughts but it is actually a bit more complicated than that. Our mind serves as a ‘receiver’ for thoughts that are in vibrational alignment with our levels of consciousness. We are always working in the collective pool of thought.
If we are in victim consciousness, we will receive thoughts that are a reflection of that world view such as judgement, anger and blame. If we are in higher consciousness, we will receive thoughts that are more loving, accepting, and harmonious.
Regardless of where we are on our spiritual journey, we can always choose to be the observer of the thoughts and watch them flow through us without attaching meaning to them. We can also expose ourselves to inspirational and uplifting stimuli to encourage thoughts that are supportive of where we’d like to be in our life while we do the work on our personal development.
What Words come out of your mouth? Words are very powerful and become our stated intentions, again either consciously or unconsciously. It is helpful to watch our language. Do we see everything as a problem? Do we throw around the word hate? Words also have a frequency to them and affect us more then we know.
What are the Actions you engage in daily? Our actions tell us a lot about what matters to us! We can say we value health and fitness but if we eat whatever we want and never visit a gym, then our reality demonstrates otherwise. This works with every area of our life.
What Habits do you continue to replay again and again? Do your habits support the kind of life you say you want to create for yourself? If not, why? What are you consistently perpetuating for yourself day after day after day?
What are your Values? We say we value freedom, abundance, joy and expression however unless our daily habits are actually demonstrations of these energies – they aren’t actually our Values. We may be unconsciously encouraging the Values of procrastination, co-dependence, withholding, dis-empowerment and lack.
Destiny is ultimately determined by us and what we do with every sacred moment we have on this planet. We can blame our misery on our circumstances but that is becoming less and less effective mostly because it’s simply not true. Holding on to the lies we tell ourselves will never create a life of fulfillment and abundance.
As James Collins so eloquently said “Greatness is not a function of circumstance. Greatness, it turns out, is largely a manner of conscious choice and discipline.”
Your Sacred Truth is connecting to the knowing that you are a magnificent being with unlimited potential and unlocking the capacity inherent within you. I invite you to take the journey of exploration and up level your awareness with a commitment to Discovery of Self.
