Every Day You Get to Choose Your Life Approach
This is incredibly empowering for us all.
Over the years, I’ve made some adjustments and alterations to how I define mindfulness. Specifically, what goes into it.
Mindfulness, as I define it, is active conscious awareness. It’s the practice of being actively, consciously aware of your mindset/headspace/psyche self, here and now. In the present, the only time that’s really, truly, real.
Initially, I quantified what went into practicing mindfulness as knowing what you’re thinking, how and what you’re feeling, and what you’re doing. In time, as I developed my definition of mindfulness, I added becoming consciously aware of what you’re intending.
Thoughts, feelings, and actions are easily defined. Thought/thinking is your ideas, notions, concepts, and the like. It’s the starting point for everything. Feeling is the sensation of how you feel, warm and fuzzy, cold and furious, the anxiousness – good or bad – of butterflies in your stomach, and so on. Feeling is also what the emotion is. The reason what and how are separate is because how you feel can vary depending on circumstances, situations, time and place, and other variables largely outside your control. What you’re doing is easy. It’s the actions you are or aren’t taking.
Intent is how you tie thought and feeling together via active conscious awareness to do or not do something. It’s the goal you seek from the action, the achievement your action will lead to, and the why behind the action devised from the thought and feeling.
All these elements are necessary parts of active conscious awareness and mindfulness practice to get from here to there, no matter what the distance is.
Change being the one and only constant in the Universe, how I am approaching the practice of mindfulness is changing again. This involves approach.
Your angle of approach to life is another choice
Positivity and negativity are opposite ends of a spectrum. They’re frequently compared as opposite sides of a coin. I’ve reimagined this, however, as more of a cylinder, since there’s a lot of space, color, and nuance between positivity and negativity. What’s more, the cylinder is flexible because today’s positive can become tomorrow’s negative and vice versa.
More often than not we find ourselves not at either end of the spectrum, but instead somewhere towards the middle. However, from that midpoint, we always have a choice. That choice is which end of the cylinder to face.
Where in the center of the spectrum on the flexible cylinder between positivity and negativity that you exist varies. Mood, environment, time of day, who you’re with or not with, weather, your health on every level, and numerous other factors move you along the cylinder between the positive and negative ends.
You always exist somewhere between positivity and negativity. However, when you’re not actively consciously aware, you are living subconsciously. When you’re living subconsciously, all sorts of outside factors will impact your thoughts, feelings, overall mood, and general state of being.
When you let rote, routine, and habit do the driving and live subconsciously, all sorts of factors will move you. Some will be subtle and others blatant. However, when you practice active conscious awareness, you take control.
When you start to take control, you start to practice mindfulness. This is where knowing your thoughts, feelings, actions, and intentions comes into play. If they’re not aligned with your desires, you can change them.
There is, however, one more element you can control via mindfulness. That’s your approach to life. This is not the same as intent because it’s specific to which direction your face on the flexible cylinder between positivity and negativity.
Choices are the key to empowering yourself
It’s surprisingly easy to lose sight of your approach. When you’re largely living subconsciously, you might not know which direction you’re facing.
This can be especially challenging when you have been living subconsciously and find yourself in an existential crisis, uncertainty, or that hard-to-fathom sense of wrong, something not being right, or things being off you can’t put into words. Living subconsciously, as such, tends to mean you are being influenced by outside factors that will draw your attention. Often, these are negatives.
Why? Because we live in a fear-based society where lack, scarcity, insufficiency, and playing on our fears of missing out, losing what we have, losing our sovereignty, and the like are used to persuade us. That’s how advertising sells us shit we don’t need, politicians who don’t care about anyone but themselves keep getting elected, religious leaders foment hate for other religions and atheists, and business leaders convince us that losing some of their surreal profit to pay taxes or better wages is a hardship.
When we’re not being actively consciously aware, we tend not to pay attention to what we’re taking in and consuming via our mind, heart, and soul. Before long, we can find ourselves feeling disempowered because of that.
To regain our empowerment, we just need to make choices. These aren’t big, earth-shattering choices like where to live, who to date, or the like. Neither are they smaller tangibles like what you put on after getting out of the shower, what you should eat for lunch, and if you should take the stairs rather than the elevator.
These choices are about what you think, feel, intend, and act upon, as well as direction on the flexible cylinder between positivity and negativity that you face.
It really is that simple.
Not choosing is still a choice, but not empowering
Some people might consider neutrality. Isn’t choosing to face neither positivity nor negativity an option?
It is, but with neutrality comes complacency and disempowerment.
Take elections, for example. People who don’t vote often tell you it’s because they dislike their choices. That’s fair. However, when you are facing false equivalencies, or ignoring the fascist tendencies of one side over the other, you set yourself up to be complacent and reactive if/when shit goes down.
Likewise, not making a choice or choosing to remain neutral isn’t empowering. Why? Because you aren’t exercising the power you have to take control over the parts of your life wholly in your control.
What parts are those? What you’re thinking, what and how you’re feeling, what you’re doing, your intent, and what approach you’re taking. In other words, your active, conscious awareness. The control that, ultimately, lets you take the wheel to drive your life.
If today was a bad day, tomorrow you get to choose anew. When you sometimes choose poorly – and you will – you get to choose again. Change being the only universal constant means you can always change via your own choices and decisions.
This isn’t always easy, but it’s always worth it. That’s because who better than you should be driving your life?
Choosing your life approach isn’t hard
It’s all about practicing mindfulness of your thoughts, feelings, intentions, and approach to direct your actions.
When you recognize that you always exist somewhere between positivity and negativity on the flexible cylinder between them, you can make choices as to what direction and approach to take at any given time. Knowing that positivity and making choices empowers, and neutrality and not making choices disempowers, you can make those choices and decisions, choose to approach life from a place of positivity rather than negativity or neutrality to take control over your life experience.
This empowers you, and your empowerment can empower others around you.
Consciously choosing your approach to life towards positivity or negativity – from the vast cylinder that exists between them – shifts life in a way that opens more dialogue. With a broader dialogue, you can explore and share where you are between the extremes and how that impacts you here and now.
Choosing thoughts, feelings, actions, and intentions for yourself employs an approach and attitude of positivity for realizing amazing potential and possibilities for your life.
The better aware you are of yourself in the now, the more you can do to choose and decide how your life experiences will be. When that empowers you, it can spread to those around you to their empowerment.
Thank you for coming along on this journey.
This is the five-hundred and twenty-sixth (526) entry of my Positivity series. I hope that these weekly messages might help spread positive energies for everyone. Feel free to share, re-blog, and spread the positivity.
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