A Challenge to My Readers

Let’s build greater consciousness about how we assign meaning, together!

Photo by Manki Kim on Unsplash

These days, I see the movement towards greater consciousness alive across so many vectors of human experience. From jobs to gender, politics to the economy, healing to spirituality, we’re challenging and redefining what everything means and what we, ourselves, mean within it.

The consciousness movement takes many forms, and I’ve written about many of them here already. I think, though, that there comes a point in the journey towards greater consciousness when we feel less inclined to theorize and more inclined towards practice.

So, I humbly invite you all to practice consciousness with me.

To me, the starting point of increasing our consciousness is always in recognizing how our thoughts shape our reactions to what we experience. In order to open any space for training the mind towards greater consciousness, we must first recognize the power of the mind to shape how we interface with our lives. Between anything that happens and how we feel and respond in the face of it, there lies a hidden agent: our thoughts.

Everything we experience is filtered through our thoughts about it, usually unconsciously. That is to say: we assign meaning to what happens with our thoughts, typically without realizing that’s what we’re doing. The point of this challenge is to become aware of that process, and start playing with what those thoughts could be.

I’m aware that even this idea is contentious for many people, especially when it comes to pain and trauma. To say, “Your deep and visceral experience was actually crafted by your thoughts, not by what happened to you” is understandably invalidating. That notion is often at odds with our experience itself, because we perceive the external events as directly causing our responses to them.

In my experience, the negative reaction to recognizing that thoughts are the crafters of feelings arises because we have other thoughts that place value judgments on ourselves in that process. We believe that seeing the power of the mind to create pain would make our painful experiences our fault, as opposed to the fault of what was done to us, or that the process is implying that we should have…