Is it fair to say life is challenging at the best of times? And now the pandemic has come, life is even more a matter of survival – not just directly from the disease, but economically, psychologically…
Every one of us has an invisible ‘score’ for how conscious we are. Please don’t buy into any notions of conscious living being something flowery for spiritual types, because it is actually one and the same as your own capacity to be true to yourself. ‘Conscious’ just means aware of what is motivating us and driving our actions in a given moment.
When people judge and scold us – usually as children – we shut off parts of our true selves and instead unwittingly take on a false self role in order to gain their approval. This becomes the unconscious’ – a ‘bag’ in which all the unacceptable parts of ourselves are repressed.
If you imagine a cross-section of society, some people will be brought up in a very loving manner, with a kind school culture and an empowering community environment. These people may have ‘Conscious Scores’ of eighty or ninety percent or maybe more. For these people, they are rarely ‘in their head’, find life relatively easy, are almost certainly comfortable in their own skin, and probably wonder what all the fuss is about.
Contrast that with a child who is brought up by abusive parents, an authoritarian school culture which psychologically beats them down and a community that relentlessly manipulates them (perhaps for profit, e.g., incessant television advertising) and you see an adult emerge who may be lucky to be even thirty percent ‘conscious’; unable to be more than thirty percent true to themselves. This is a major inhibitor to living, and even more of a disadvantage when a global pandemic strikes! Where is the emotional and psychological resiliency? Their capacity to tap into their own natural resourcefulness will have been hugely compromised.
Everyone has a ‘conscious score’ between these two extremes. If we then imagine a life in which we had known nothing but unconditional love and acceptance for who we are since birth – domestically, socially, environmentally, culturally – we would be one hundred percent conscious, one hundred percent true to self, with access to one hundred percent of our innate resourcefulness. We would also be unrecognisable from the people we see ourselves as now. Yet this is the more real ‘us’.
The good news is that we can reclaim every last bit of that. Kissing Consciousness is all about closing this gap; helping people to close the gap wherever they wish to. In the next article I’ll show you how, but before then you can also listen to this recent, fifteen-minute radio interview I gave explaining all of this context in more detail. Listen in at www.kissingconsciousness.com/discovering-magazine
Email: contact@kissingconsciousness.com or call 02045 165 091