Many people are living compulsively. Life happens to them instead of them creating a life they want.
But if you want to do it differently, to live your life consciously for maximum impact and fulfillment, read on through this piece to gain insight from consciousness experts.
Let’s dive in!
1. Switch Your Focus to Positive Beliefs
Belief systems are what run your life to look the way it looks on the outside. Meaning you are what you believe – the set of values and principles you operate your life on.
Here are examples of positive beliefs that run successful conscious lives:
- I am good enough
- My life matters
- My mindset determines how I feel about my life
- I am responsible for my own happiness
- I can provide value in the lives of others using the abilities I have
- I can improve myself
See how these examples help you live consciously? It’s because they show that your life is worth living and living it in the best way for that matter.
But imagine the outcome of the following negative beliefs:
- I am inadequate
- I cannot trust people
- No one can love my truest self
- It’s too late to fix my life
- I can’t be happy with my life because no one envies it
- Everyone will make me miserable if I don’t do what they want
Feel the quiet desperation behind these toxic beliefs already? These beliefs are a great hindrance to living consciously.
So if you want to live consciously, start embracing positive beliefs in place of all the negatives you’ve been operating on.
2. Clutch Onto Positive Values
Positive values heighten your consciousness while negative ones lower it.
Think about it, it doesn’t take any effort for things in your life to get bad, right. Not caring for just a week can render you jobless, and depressed, leave you in a home full of clutter, make your partner ditch you, and other horrible results of neglect.
All it takes to make your life miserable is letting go of all consciousness – to choose recklessness over care.
However, if you want to live consciously, you must pursue honesty, courage, responsibility, equality, reason, intention, and compassion over corruption, cowardice, unreliability, partiality, irrationality, compulsion, and cruelty.
3. Practice Paying Attention in Every Situation
Consciousness and attention are almost synonyms. Without paying attention, it’ll be impossible to live consciously and vice versa.
In this fast-paced era, it’s difficult to not give in to the distractions surrounding our every task. It could be a Facebook notification, breaking news on the TV, or simply our colleague demanding our attention while we’re focusing on a project.
But these are the pressing reasons we must refocus our attention on what we’re doing whenever it gets stolen away by other issues. To be truly successful in our entire lives, we must refuse to be distracted by setting boundaries for ourselves and others.
More practice focusing attention where it’s needed helps you live more consciously every day.
4. Build Self-Awareness
Self-awareness is key to living consciously. After all, how can you live the life you want if you don’t know what life you want in the first place?
To understand what in life to work towards, you have to know yourself. So here are questions to help you boost your awareness of self:
- Who am I in a few words?
- What are my greatest worries about my life?
- What are my goals?
- Is each of my goals what I really desire or am I following what others want?
- When all pressures of life are lifted, what would I want to do with myself?
- What are the responsibilities I deem worthy of my time?
- If I’m not ready to do it now, then when?
- What are my strengths?
- Where am I weak at?
- What truths about myself do I find hard to accept?
The answers to these questions help you realize the aspects of your life you haven’t been living consciously. And this helps you know the necessary changes you need to make.
5. Pause to Reclaim Your Direction
Practicing a conscious life takes time. So don’t give up each time you fail to be conscious of your actions. For this is where this tactic comes in.
Whenever you realize you were distracted or have been going on a whim with issues, you need to pause what you’re doing and get back on track. This is important to do whenever you realize it since if you stay distracted longer you’ll be taking many steps back from conscious living.
So let’s say you’ve gotten into a relationship and things are moving fast, you find yourself compromising some of your values, your other goals are hurting and whenever your rational self pops in, you feel you’re not going in the right direction. In such cases, you have to stop.
You have to pause and ask yourself, “Am I still consciously moving towards my goals?” For this example, you can take a break from the relationship or go somewhere to think.
6. Face Your Truth
Integrity is the glue around conscious living.
the most transformed people learned the art of accepting and embracing the truth. Especially bitter truths.
You can’t practice conscious living if you keep lying to yourself and others about who you are, why you do what you do, and the type of life you want.
Do you have imperfections you find hard to embrace? Face it. Do you have insecurities holding you back? Come clean about it. Have you been struggling with something and yearned to ask for help? Speak your truth.
After all, the truth shall set you free. Always.
7. Practice Regular Self Reflection
While building self-awareness, you’ll know the goals you have and the ways to reach there. So this strategy for conscious living is about asking yourself:
“Am I consciously moving towards my goals or not?”
Practicing regular self-reflection is conscious living itself and also a way to live consciously. Whether you prefer monthly reviews, weekly reflections, or even daily end-of-the-day self-reflection, using this tactic sets you up for a successful conscious living.
Related: How To Activate Subconscious Mind With Power Techniques
8. Approach Each Facet of Your Life Consciously
Personal growth is about being holistically conscious about your life. You can’t live consciously by only focusing on your spiritual growth or financial decisions – it’s about your whole life.
Here are 7 main facets of conscious living:
- Spiritual: What are your beliefs so far? Have you ever questioned them?
- Intellectual: Are you working on your knowledge acquisition dreams? Are your efforts aligned with your dreams?
- Emotional: On a scale of 1-10, are you in charge of your emotions, or are they more in charge of you? How can you take charge of your emotional wellbeing more?
- Financial: How often do you do impulse buying? How can you improve your financial habits to align with your conscious living?
- Social: Are you intentional about who you let in your life and how much? Do you pursue peace with all people in your life?
- Physical: Do you eat consciously and also get some physical exercise to stay healthy? How can you incorporate healthy eating and activity into your life?
- Environmental: How environmentally conscious are you? How can you improve the environment in your community?
If you use this checklist to live consciously, you’d lead an all-around life well lived.
9. Check How You Spend Your Time
According to Jim Rohn, it’s “Either you run your day, or your day runs you.”
This is one of those punchy quotes explaining what life choices are all about: Either you live unconsciously or choose to live consciously. There’s no other option for spending time.
You have to choose to run your day if you’re going to be successful at conscious living. Your time is for executing your priorities.
For instance, if your priority is a happy close family, spending most of your time at work would be living unconsciously – against your goals.
So spend time on your priorities and unimportant issues won’t have space in your day.
10. Continually Practice What You Said You’ll Do
Since conscious living doesn’t run on compulsion you have to always strive to follow through with your plans.
You can’t say you don’t feel like doing laundry and just let your goals slide. You can’t say “I’m not feeling it,” and expect your company to run efficiently without hitting your January milestones.
Conscious living is about making conscious choices to follow through with your plans even when they aren’t attractive.
When your lazy self says, “I don’t feel like doing this today,” may your unconscious self respond, “I shall do what I said I’ll do even if I don’t feel like it.”
11. Accept Your Failures and Move On to Greater Consciousness
But of course, you’re human. And like everyone else on this planet, you can fail to follow through with some of your conscious decisions. Yet this doesn’t mean you’re doomed to unconscious living.
Even when you fail to be as conscious as you hoped, retrace your steps and try again. A little improvement – a little conscious action adds up to the progressive realization of a greater consciousness and thus, a life well-lived.
Interested in treating others more consciously, check out Consciousness & Love – Ideas To Combine These Powerful Forces.
More on How to Live Consciously
Want to know more about conscious living? Come with me briefly through this section!
What does it mean to live consciously?
To live consciously means to experience your own life intentionally from choosing the thoughts you want to have to the actions you want to execute. Opposite to living compulsively or passively, living consciously means that you stay present in your everyday activities of life so that you can live the life you want instead of the life that befalls you.
How can we live consciously? How to live consciously sadhguru
We can live consciously by:
- Switching focus to positive beliefs
- Clutching onto positive values
- Paying attention in every situation
- Being more self-aware
- Pausing to reclaim self-direction
- Facing truth
- Practicing regular self-reflection
- Approaching each facet of life consciously
- Checking how we spend our time
- Following through with what we say we’ll do
- Accepting failures to move on to greater consciousness
What does it mean to do things consciously? Live consciously each day
Doing things consciously means you make intentional decisions and act on them with your mind fully invested in the actions that produce the best results according to your abilities. It’s about doing things with purpose.
Why is it important to live consciously?
It’s important to live consciously because:
- You’ll experience more joy and fulfillment in living in the moment
- You’ll be more productive in your tasks
- You’ll direct your energy where it’s most needed
- You become more self-aware
- You avoid rash judgment
- You would develop self-love
- You’d respond spontaneously yet more wisely to situations
- It helps you overcome your fears more
How to eat consciously live consciously
To eat consciously that you may live consciously, you need to:
- Focus on experiencing the flavor of your food
- Eat slowly
- Consume a balanced diet
- Eat without distractions
- Eat only when you’re truly hungry and quit eating when you feel full
- Be mindful of your hunger triggers – whether you’re truly hungry or are merely responding to emotional (feeling stressed and therefore seeking a distraction like food) or environmental (Smell or sight of food) cravings
- Eat in silence
Onto Conscious Living
Leading a conscious life in this unconscious world takes time and effort. But it’s worth it every time.
I hope you have now mastered how to live consciously. So don’t wait any longer. Start paying attention to your actions now and create the life you always wanted.
Before you go, which of the above tactics are you planning to use for conscious living? Let’s talk in the comments!
And don’t forget to share this piece with your friends if you loved it.! Thanks for stopping by.
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