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How to Live Your Life Consciously

Every human being should live his or her life as consciously as possible. This is of paramount importance. I always try to bring to my consciousness everything that comes up from my unconscious mind.

Living consciously can help you too. It can help you clear the fog in front of your eyes so that you can see where you are going. It can also help you make deliberate choices rather than automatic ones. After all, we all want to control our destiny as firmly as possible.

Have you ever had the strange feeling that you are wandering through life without a defined purpose and knowledge of where you would like to be tomorrow? I certainly have as well as many other people, and chances are you too have hand such a feeling that brings discomfort and unease. In many cases, it is not a pleasant insight into your current situation and a bitter pill to swallow.

When you decide to start living a conscious life, in fact, you decide to take control of your life. That way, you can start steering yourself toward the life you would like to live, instead of the one that befalls you.

If you are just wandering through life, deciding to take conscious control may be the one of the most important things for you at this point.

How conscious in your life are you presently?

Here is a list of questions that you can ask yourself, and if you find out that you answer is "no" to most of them, then you may consider increasing the degree of consciousness in your life:

1. Is your job the dream job that you always wanted to have?
2. Do you have a lot of time to spend together with your loved ones, instead of spending endless hours at work?
3. Are you doing things that you have selected personally and you love to do?
4. Are you focusing on completing important things instead of wasting time on things that are not very important?
5. Can you choose not to spend your time doing busy work and decide on your own what you want to do with your days?
6. Do you think about what you want to achieve in your life instead of going through life without direction and purpose?
7. Are you fit and in good shape?
8. Do you regularly consume healthy food?

If you answered most of these questions with "yes", then you are probably already living consciously enough and you probably don't need to continue with this post. If, however, your answer was "no" to most of them, you should certainly read on about a couple good tips how to increase your consciousness.

How to Live Your Life Consciously

At this point, I should tell you that there is a good and a bad news. The bad news is that living consciously requires a lot of effort, training and skill. It is not something that you can get overnight. It isn't something that you can do just once and forget. If you have decided that you want to be conscious in your life, you will have to be prepared for a life-long battle. Living consciously is a habit that is being formed throughout the rest of your life.

The good news is that it is very simple. Nothing is complicated, everyone can do it. Even the most limited person. All we have to do is be conscious. Be present. Be awake. That it all. Turn off the autopilot. Think about what you are doing. Never turn on the autopilot again. Make conscious decisions. Be aware of your body, thoughts, feelings, desires, urges, positive or negative inclinations.

In reality, "being there" is all that it takes. In spite of the simplicity, very few people actually do it. Very few people are conscious in their lives. They think it is easier if they don't think, if they are not fully present in the moment.

Some people even think that the responsibility is reduced to zero if they are not conscious, even though that's an illusion. We are always fully responsible for every single thing we do, no matter how unconscious we are. This is just one additional incentive for us to wake up and become conscious about ourselves.

Anyhow, it takes conscious effort in order to be conscious. It takes energy, and will and vigilance, so that we are always alert and aware of what's going on around us.

Here is a list of instructions that might help you become more conscious in your life:

• Reflect on your life regularly. It can be that you keep a journal, or you can choose any other way that suits you. You can update your journal every evening or every morning. Or even once a week is OK. It is important to make a habit of doing this regularly. Give things some thinking over. Contemplate over your life on a regular basis. In addition to keeping journal, you can reflect in your mind every night before going to bad. Just go mentally over the past events of that day in a reverse order, starting from what happened in the evening and going back to the morning hours.
• Reflect over your life’s goals. You can do this once a year. Ask yourself the following questions. What is my purpose, what do I want to do in my life? How do I imagine my life should be? Do I see a clear way how to get there? Write your reflections down, and keep them somewhere close so that you can check your life's goals every now and then. Don't hesitate to take the necessary actions.
• Reflect over the people you love. Sometimes we think that money or carrier is the most important thing in our life. But, in fact, the people we love are the single most important thing in our life. That's why you need to set apart some time to regularly review your relationships with them. Think about the following questions. Do you spend adequate time with them? Are you satisfied with the way your relationships are going? How can you improve your relationships? What are the things that you need to forgive? What are the things that you need to apologize about? Can you improve your communication with them?
• Reflect over your use of time. Time is the single most important asset that we have in our life. How do you spend it? We are usually not aware about our use of time until we do a time audit. Once we honestly do that, we can be really surprised about how we usually spend our time. When you make conscious evaluations about the ways you spend your time, you can start managing your future time more efficiently.
• Think about your influence on the world. Consider how every action you take has a corresponding reaction. For example, everything that you do, everything that you consume, the way you live your life, all that impacts the environment. By the very fact that we are alive, we are influencing the people around us, our community and our planet. Think about it, and be sure that you are conscious of how your decisions affect others.
• Consider your needs vs your desires. When we make our purchases, we are often guided by our desires. Whenever we do so, we pay little or no attention to how much the things we want really cost. Sure, there are things that we "need" to buy, and that's all right. But do you really want to spend $50 to buy some trivial thing that you have no real real need to possess.
• Think about the cost of the stuff you already have. I bet your life is already filled with all kinds of stuff. Our homes contain a lot of things that we have purchased over time. It is not just the cost of buying the stuff. It is also the cost of maintaining it - cleaning, arranging, moving, etc. Every thing that we have takes up a bit of our space, our time and our energy. Even if you decide that you no longer want to have some thing, you would have to dispose it, donate it, recycle it or get rid of it in some way. So, it is definitely worth making conscious decisions regarding the stuff that we already own.
• Meditate on who you are. Any kind of meditation exercise is a great way to expand our consciousness. In addition to that, we can meditate on our own personality. The trick is to set some time to think about who you are. What are your most dominant character traits. What are your virtue? What are your character flaws? Contemplate about how you interact with other people. How you treat them and how they treat you. It time well spent and one of the best way to improve your conscious living.

Useful resources:

Rescue time for time tracking while you work on your PC.

Your Money or Your Life - the basic idea of money as something you trade life energy for

How conscious your life is? What do you do to increase your consciousness. Share your thoughts in the comments section below.

About the Author

Written by Mira Lonnia, new age author and self improvement expert. You can follow her on @blickrs

Disclaimer:

The above guest post is published based on the premise that it will be helpful and informative. The opinions made within it are those of the author and not of sunnyray.org. The links you may find within this post do not necessarily imply our recommendation or endorsement of the views expressed within them.

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