Being Your Own Compass
How aware are you of the direction your subjective experience is heading? As the cultivator of your individual experience, do you trust that you have the best repertoire to inform the most wholesome outcomes? Are you aware that you may be the cultivator and the experiencer?
Mindfulness is a tool - the ultimate informer of the best decision making, because it enables the experiencer to understand what exactly they need to experience.
Mindfulness is a word that can be lost in the mainstream fodder attempting to understand and commodify it beyond its genuine purpose. You can begin to think of mindfulness as an activity or state of mind that bridges the experiencer and the experienced. How aware are you of how different scenarios, thoughts, circumstances, conditions, or different phenomenon effect your present, subjective experience. How can you leverage your own reactivity to different phenomenon to cultivate an infallible life compass.
Are you able to curiously observe and understand how your conditioning is influencing your present moment reactivity and well-being. As you navigate your daily life, you undergo a series of sensory or mental experiences that each have an effect on how you feel at a given time. If you have been conditioned to put pressure on yourself to succeed, then a news story of a successful entrepreneur may kickstart an avalanche of self-defeating beliefs about why YOU’RE not there and as successful. You may have gotten used to this experience and understand it to be who you are - a person who needs to succeed, but can’t, therefore you MUST BE all the negative thoughts that confirm that belief. You enable this type of self-created hell by not serving as a compassionate advocate of yourself - you may have never developed the skill or even desire to alleviate this source of suffering from yourself.
It may help to picture this relationship with yourself as a parent to child relationship. Imagine you witness a child spiral into a self-critical tirade that leaves them vulnerable to depression, anxiety, or other negative affective traits every time that they see a person that is seemingly more successful than them. As the parental figure, you would do everything in your power to comfort the child and understand the root of that suffering in order to alleviate them of the negativity associated with that certain thought spiral. Every parent wants their child to live a fulfilling and loving life - so they do everything in their power to create the conditions for that reality to manifest. Why can’t you afford yourself that same compassion?
This is where mindfulness comes in. If you begin to curiously observe how your reactions to different phenomenon influence your immediate subjective well- being, you can begin to consciously create the conditions that guide you in the direction of fulfillment, joy, openness, and wholesomeness. You can retrain your brain to pull you in the direction of behaviors and circumstances that result in wholesome outcomes instead of unwholesome outcomes. This requires self-love and the tools to help strengthen this compass. Once you reach a state where you are using mindfulness as your navigation tool, you get better and better at understanding yourself and what keeps you fulfilled. Through patience and trial and error, you can slowly master your own experience and do everything in your power to cultivate openness at any given moment.
This state of momentary awareness, acceptance, curiosity, and openness is not the destination, but instead the STARTING POINT. Once you are in the state of mindful, momentary acceptance you can begin to unearth your unique potential and forge your life journey in the most informed and wholesome way. It all begins now. With the right tools and skills in your repertoire, you can journey through life confident that you are doing what is best for yourself and others.