You have a power within you that is greater than your intellect, your ability to reason or problem solve. You have a power that can literally change your world on a dime, creating a new experience and expression of yourself in the moment.
What is this power? It is the power of your energetic consciousness and how you learn to use, guide and direct your emotions, decisions, thoughts, and beliefs.
With the tremendous advances in brain science and neurology, there is much less debate today about the importance of our mindset, thinking and emotional self-regulation. While it was once a common expression to assert, “I can’t help it, this is just how I feel.” We know today that we can, in fact, alter our emotional responses to things at any given moment. Like any skill that you develop, learning to elevate your consciousness takes awareness, commitment, clarity and most of all practice.
I was in a training once where participants were asked to recall the most challenging experience they ever had and to remember it with great detail. What were you wearing? Who was in the room? What was the lighting like? Who was speaking and what was their tone of voice? Their facial expression? People were asked to write down their memory and then recall it verbally to someone else in the room. The room was thick with emotion. Some people were crying, some even screaming as they recounted the situation.
Then, after completing that process, we were asked to do the same steps, but to recount the most joyful experience we had ever had. The same instructions were given to go into minute detail about the experience, write it down and then verbally recount it.
The change in the room from the first to the second exercise was remarkable as you can well imagine. But let’s look at this experience a bit more. What was happening? 20 or 30 people were sitting in a room recounting memories. They were not living in the painful or the joyful experience. They were merely imagining it and yet, the use of their imagination entirely changed the state of each participant.
You can use this tool every day whenever you desire to change your state. As I have written in other posts, I once suffered from long-standing depression. While I am blessed to be 100% free of that illness now, I still have my moments when for no apparent reason, I just feel blue. Therapists call this “dysthymia.” I call it latent neurological programming. These feelings of being down are only as real as I make them be. So instead of delving into the depths of despair, I remind myself that emotions are fleeting and that my life is incredibly blessed. I shift my focus and use the power of my imagination and my higher mind to think about how I want to feel and indeed believe it is my birthright to feel, rather than linger in negativity.
Look, I don’t in any way mean that you should walk around being yippy skippy happy and dancing 24/7/365. That’s bullshit. Negative emotions are a part of life, and you can embrace them for just that: they are part of your human experience. But I long for something more, something higher and more potent than that. I want to know the full power of who I am – experience and express the secret power within me. What that means is that you can have complete control over your inner world. You just have to learn how to manage it.
To help you practice this level of self-mastery, I want to share a simple exercise that I have my coaching clients do. It is part of the activities in the Curriculum for Conscious Living. It is called the “High Consciousness Attribute Exercise,” and in it, you are to take on a high consciousness attribute for one week and live every minute inside of that attribute. You bring it to every situation and every person, including yourself, for one week.
For example, you could take on the attribute of patience, acceptance, peace of mind, unconditional love, or joy. Choose a quality that does not come naturally to you. The two that my clients most often chose are patient and accepting! Imagine that! Our egos are active and want to always be in control, don’t they?
Suppose you choose the attribute of patience and you go into your next meeting where one of your colleagues is derailing the forward action. Your typical reaction is inner fury, frustration, aggravation, and resignation. You sit through the remainder of the meeting gritting your teeth and wondering why someone doesn’t stop him. This time, having committed to the attribute of patience, you recognize your immediate tendency toward frustration, and you let it go. You redirect your thoughts to wonder what is going on for him, and then from that place, you are the one to speak up, kindly and professionally, to redirect the experience for the entire room. That is an actual experience of one of my coaching clients!
Changing your state of mind, leaning into and developing the ability to live in high consciousness states all the time is your secret power. The more you use it, the more you will grow into the person, and create the life, that you long to experience and know.