Why Consciousness Matters: Part I
Why Consciousness Matters
And How To Increase Yours
Did you know that we’re all trying to achieve a higher state of consciousness?
In a way, that’s the point of therapy. I’ll get to that in a moment.
Growing in consciousness is part of human evolution. It’s also why everyone feels a slight, internal angst. When we feel internally stagnant or our internal state is out of alignment with our external environment, something feels off.
You can become more conscious in different realms: Physical / Sexual / Social / Relational / Spiritual / Emotional / Mental.
We want more of it.
We want to get the most out of ourselves.
We want to grow and evolve along with our environment.
Consciousness is not a static state; it’s a lifelong process of growth.
Before we get going, I’m going to give you a working definition of consciousness: consciousness is your ability to work through stuff. I’ll make this more tangible with an example.
Imagine Rex.
Rex has never done a proper workout. Rex has rarely exercised.
So Rex gets a gym membership and a personal trainer. Rex shows up each and every day for the next year.
At first, Rex can’t run for more than 10 seconds without sweating. He can’t lift the bar for more than 5 reps. He can’t do any exercise with proper form or coordination.
Rex has no idea what he’s doing.
He’s just moving body parts.
He is sweating in places he never knew existed.
Everything is awkward. Every muscle feels taxed.
Parts of his body he didn’t know existed are screaming.
He wants to quit. Or die. Whatever is easiest.
Here’s a question. As Rex is starting out, “What is the ‘consciousness’ of his body? Of his raw, physical ability? What is his ‘ability to work through stuff?’”
Rex’s consciousness is low, right?
But Rex keeps showing up.
Rex’s sore muscles begin speaking to him.
Rex stretches his body becoming more aware of strains and injury prevention.
Rex is constantly learning proper technique with each exercise and learning new ones.
Rex eats healthier food becoming more aware of how food affects his mind and body.
Rex becomes more aware of how much rest and recovery he needs.
A year in, Rex has stayed on course.
Rex can lift 3x as much as when he started. Rex is 3x as fast as he used to be. Rex can recover from a workout in a third of the time.
Hasn’t Rex’s ‘ability to work through stuff’ increased significantly?
His ability to handle a workload is light years ahead of where he was. What’s that’s mean? In many ways, Rex’s body has more than tripled its state of consciousness. His body now has more LIFE! It feels ALIVE!
This is how consciousness works. It’s your ability to work through stuff. And here’s something that’s cool. Your ability to acquire consciousness in any one thing will increase your propensity to have more consciousness in other areas (i.e. Physical / Sexual / Social / Relational / Spiritual / Emotional / Mental).
Most of the time when you grow in consciousness in one domain, don’t you find you also grow in others?
Here’s a corollary.
Consciousness is your ability to work through stuff; it’s not just your ability to do work. Many confuse the two statements. Hard work is not necessarily increasing your ability to work through stuff. People work hard all the time and don’t improve in things.
Why am I delineating this?? For you to grow in consciousness, you must continually challenge and push yourself in new disciplines.
If Rex merely worked out on the elliptical for a year straight, sure, he’d get fitter. But his ability to work through things would plateau. For many of us, we are working hard at different things and never increasing our consciousness.
Deep down, we want to be challenged. We want to be stimulated. We want to become more conscious.
When it comes to mental health, many don’t realize that they’re in the state that Rex was in before he started at the gym. Sure, people use thoughts and feelings, similar to how Rex used his arms and legs every day. But like Rex, they’ve rarely pushed through an intense workout. Or in this case, an intense workout of their emotions. They might be working hard and sweating a bunch, but not improving.
Rex had to continually push past increasing levels of resistance to build up his strength. But for most of us, what happens when we face psychological resistance?
We give in. We get angry and frustrated. We self-medicate. We project. We deflect. We tune out and distract ourselves. We make excuses. Or, we do the same methods we’ve always done. That’s like Rex doing the elliptical for a year. He’s going to get limited results.
So in a nutshell, therapy should have you working out your thoughts and feelings in healthier ways. Over time, your ability to take on an emotional workload should increase. Through weeks of therapy, you able to look back on your old self, and notice your ability to handle the similar situations has gotten better. You should feel more confident in your abilities. You should have a greater ability to work through stuff.
So if you level of anxiety went from a 7 to a 4, that’s huge! If your level of depression went from a 8 to a 3, that’s amazing progress! If it once took you a few months to state to a friend, spouse, or boss how you feel about something and it now takes you a week, that’s a huge improvement! Or if you are able to process a feeling and thought in the moment, your ability to work through stuff has exponentially increased.
You are becoming more conscious!
If you’re interested in learning more about consciousness, I heard a set of podcasts from Personality Hacker that got me interested. Also, look up “Graves Spiral Dynamics” to begin seeing how different levels of consciousness are intertwined between your individual self and your environment.