Effective development of consciousness entails two essential things. Firstly you need to have an good conceptual idea of what you need to do in order to improve the overall quality and effectiveness of your thinking, feeling and acting. Then you need to be able to apply this conceptual model effectively to your life, so that it moves from being an idea in your mind to something that you experience as a reality in your daily life.
In order to apply conceptual models effectively, we need to take every challenge that we find in our life as a chance to practice. This weekend I had a challenge that I think provides quite a good example of how to do this, and so I thought I would put it into an article.
The stated issue:
I was sent an email purporting to be from a friend inviting me to become a member of a website called tubley.com. In the process of trying to find out exactly what tubley was about, the site appropriated all the contacts from my email, and sent (without my permission) an email inviting my whole contact list to become a member of
tubley.com .
After having figured out what happened I felt very irritated about this invasion of privacy, and concerned that I may have done something that would in turn inconvenience friends and clients in the same way that I had been inconvenienced.
Practical things I did to manage the reaction of my consciousness to the issue.
1) Mindful acknowledgment of the problem.
The first thing that I did was to use my mindfulness to consciously recognize that I had in fact been disturbed inwardly by the events, and make a definite decision to deal with it effectively. This sounds like an obvious thing to do, but in reality we often avoid or deny negative emotional reactions within our mind and hope they will just go away if we ignore or repress them long enough. Effective management of issues within our mind involves acknowledging them as early as possible, and empowering ourselves to act to use all the practical tools that we have available to deal with the problem as well as we are able.
2) Recognition of trauma to the emotional being and child self.
I felt as if my privacy and inner space had been invaded. When this sort of thing happens it is most often our emotional self and child self that feels victimized by what has happened. So, one of the first steps that I took was to connect to my inner family and make sure that my parental self and wise old self were fully connecting and communicating to my inner child, telling him that he was not alone, that he was protected, that there was no need to panic and so on. When outer families face problems, if they stick together and remain strong then it will be very difficult for the problem to cause weakness and division amongst the members. It is the same with our ‘inner family’, if they stick together and work with each other, then it is very difficult for stress and anxiety to gain the upper hand in our mind. For this reason I often check on my own inner family, and make sure that they are communicating well together and supporting each other.
For a full description of the inner family and the different forms of intelligence they embody, please see my article on multiple intelligences.
3) Do all that can be done to manage the situation on an outer level.
What had happened had happened, I could not change that, but it was important to create a short battle plan to minimize the outer effects. This was relatively simple; send an email to everyone saying please ignore the message from tubley, and change my email password.
On a practical level this was very simple to do, but it was very important to think about it, make a definite list of all the things that could be done and then do them. This way when my mind starts worrying about the inconvenience that may be caused, or what needs to be done I can say to it ‘Everything that can be done externally has been done, there is no need to worry, you just need to let go now’.
4) Recognition of all the positive and enjoyable aspects of the weekend.
When something goes wrong, I find that it is really important to deliberately bring to mind all the good things that have happened on that day, so that rather than dwelling on the one negative thing, I am still actively appreciating the positives that have been happening. So, I simply wrote a short list of all the things to appreciate over the weekend, and made sure that when my mind started dwelling on the tubley issue, I immediately brought some of the good things to the fore front of my mind. These positive things were nothing unusual, here are a few examples:
- Restrung tennis racquet
- Had nice lunch out un very pleasant location
- Daughter recovered from fever
- Got all housework tasks done by Saturday lunchtime
Simple as these things are, by keeping a definite appreciation of them, emotionally I was able to sustain a real feeling of ‘yes, I have had a really good weekend’ even tho something a little unpleasant had happened.
5) Awareness of imbalance to energy system and discipline in meditation and Qi Gong.
I became aware that the whole tubley issue had set of a few imbalances energetically in my mind and body, for whatever reason. When we start to feel energetically imbalanced it can be very easy to start skipping our meditation and other mind/body training disciplines, when in fact these are the very times when we need them the most!
I did not do any extra meditation or Qi Gong practice this weekend, but I made very sure that I stuck to my normal routine, and consciously used my time in meditation and Qi Gong practice to address the imbalances I could feel and move my energy system back into balance, harmony and synchronization.
6) Keep smiling.
When something goes a bit wrong, one of the main ways that our negative ego and fear based thinking gets us to buy into its agenda is by getting us to take the whole thing VERY SERIOUSLY!!
So, one of the mindfulness exercises that I worked with as I was going about my daily affairs was to practice the inner smile. This prevented me from buying into any neurotic worrying or anxiety based around fear (eg: Thoughts like ‘Oh my God, what if people really think I belong to this stupid site, and want them to become a member of the ‘find a sexy date’ section??!!’) and helped me to increase my ability to remain confident in the face of a sustained attack of anxiety based thinking!
For basic information on the inner smile practice check out my article HERE:
7) Turn the situation into something useful.
The final thing that became apparent with regard to this situation was that it was actually quite a good illustration of how you can use different conscious management tools to transform an everyday situation. So, I write this article and posted it for people to read, thus making the whole thing a useful happening not just for me, but also hopefully for other people to gain a little bit of insight as well!
So, my final observation; please note that points 2-7 all depend upon point 1. This is the lynch pin of applying what you know about consciousness management to your daily life!
© Toby Ouvry 2010 please do not reproduce without permission.
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