Archive for July, 2021
Real Life: Your Awareness Trumps Your Beliefs and Your Conclusions
Saturday, July 31st, 2021
In my June column I explained that ‘conscious living’ is our ability to be true to ourselves; the only sensible measure of true success that there is. I’ll now explain why awareness, rather than beliefs, is key to that.
You may have heard the Chinese saying that: “He who chases two rabbits catches neither.” Oh, that’s sounds really wise! Yes, I’m going to commit that to myself as a belief system! Well done me! After all, I don’t want to dilute my focus! Here’s another proverb: “Don’t put all your eggs in one basket!” Oh yes, that’s really wise, too! After all, if one ‘egg’ has a problem I’ve still got the others to fall back on!
Hang on a second! I’ve just realised that those two proverbs contradict each other. They are complete opposites! And pretty soon I’ll realise that virtually all pieces of advice have opposite versions. I now realise that I can’t just rely on my belief systems to run my life and make my decisions for me, I have to use my own skill and judgement to assess what’s really true for me in each given moment. And it’s this insight which led Rikka Zimmerman to this profound piece of wisdom:
“What if you can trust YOU but you can’t trust belief systems?”
Yeaaaah!!!!! What a fantastic insight! If you rely on belief systems, they can always let you down because they are only concepts that represent reality, not reality itself (‘the map is not the territory’). But if you commit to always trusting your own knowing – that ‘knowing’ that you have when you stop justifying your beliefs and conclusions, and instead communicate openly with yourself – then you have the ultimate protection from tripping yourself up! What is justifying? It’s when you know something to be true, but aren’t ready to admit it to yourself, and so you tell yourself an overly intellectualised story that justifies going against your own true ‘knowing’, your own inner wisdom. In Kissing Consciousness, justifying is an expression of Fear Consciousness.
So, we need a new relationship to beliefs in which we hold them lightly, rather than lock them in as conclusions, which are an inhibitor to living from awareness. At first, this may be unfamiliar and uncomfortable, but with practice we can nurture and develop our natural ability to make decisions for ourselves and strengthen that capacity. There is no crutch this way, nothing to rely on, but for those who choose this way of life the rewards are a ‘real’ life. This is the choice of conscious living!
“Let it go…, let it go…” she sings. But how?
Thursday, July 15th, 2021
As Queen Elsa sang in Disney’s Frozen, the concept of ‘letting things go’ has become a norm in our culture. In my last column I promised to explain how to ‘let it go’; now it’s time to deliver.
WHAT? If we’re going to master ‘letting things go’ we need to understand what it is we’re letting go of – and where it is. When we ‘hold onto’ something it’s because we have some form of fear or discomfort around the issue. This makes us feel the need to control the situation, the outcome. We get attached to something, and feel resistance to the opposite, because we’ve been conditioned to feel that some things are not okay.
So, we’re letting go of what I call ‘Fear Consciousness’, which is always a falsehood. You can’t let go of something that’s true, but you can let go of your attachment to it – or your resistance to it. You may be a great painter but fear losing the talent if you’ve been told you’re useless without it. You may be of a certain political or sexual persuasion but fear admitting it to yourself if your family is against it.
WHERE? Science has shown that when people oppress us such that we have to suppress – bury – aspects of our true personality, it doesn’t just create a ‘wound’ that exists in the unconscious mind, it also resides in the body, in the nervous system. So, if your elders repressed your natural capacity to become a millionaire, it’s not just the mental beliefs of that possibility you need to reclaim, you also have to release the constriction from your nervous system and also reclaim – step back into – the body, the physiology of a person willing to receive their millionaire potential… which is actually pretty much everybody. So, we need to let go of a false sense of self… from our unconscious mind and from our body.
HOW? Ten years ago, I wanted to both quit my job and engage with a famous author I’d met online, called Peter Ragnar. But I had fear of becoming homeless, plus shyness about interacting with ‘famous people’. So, I just asked first myself, and then my deeper, subconscious mind and my body (same thing), to let go of those fears, and a couple of months later I simply found they had gone. I quit my job and had a great chat with Peter, who’s since written to compliment my book. Kissing Consciousness calls this ‘Passive Letting Go’ – ask yourself and your ‘Subconscious Bodymind’ to let go of something and then just let the request run its course. You can literally ask your body; “Body, would you like to let that go?” With ‘Active Letting Go’ you ask questions just the same, but you intentionally stay present to the mental, emotional and physiological resistance that typically arises as a result of challenging that historical oppression. Staying present means we allow the feelings to arise without either avoiding them or chasing after them. This act of acceptance integrates them back into our authentic self.
Your Resourcefulness, Your ‘Conscious Score’ and Your Two Lives
Thursday, July 15th, 2021
Is it fair to say life is challenging at the best of times? And now the pandemic has come, life is even more a matter of survival – not just directly from the disease, but economically, psychologically…
Every one of us has an invisible ‘score’ for how conscious we are. Please don’t buy into any notions of conscious living being something flowery for spiritual types, because it is actually one and the same as your own capacity to be true to yourself. ‘Conscious’ just means aware of what is motivating us and driving our actions in a given moment.
When people judge and scold us – usually as children – we shut off parts of our true selves and instead unwittingly take on a false self role in order to gain their approval. This becomes the unconscious’ – a ‘bag’ in which all the unacceptable parts of ourselves are repressed.
If you imagine a cross-section of society, some people will be brought up in a very loving manner, with a kind school culture and an empowering community environment. These people may have ‘Conscious Scores’ of eighty or ninety percent or maybe more. For these people, they are rarely ‘in their head’, find life relatively easy, are almost certainly comfortable in their own skin, and probably wonder what all the fuss is about.
Contrast that with a child who is brought up by abusive parents, an authoritarian school culture which psychologically beats them down and a community that relentlessly manipulates them (perhaps for profit, e.g., incessant television advertising) and you see an adult emerge who may be lucky to be even thirty percent ‘conscious’; unable to be more than thirty percent true to themselves. This is a major inhibitor to living, and even more of a disadvantage when a global pandemic strikes! Where is the emotional and psychological resiliency? Their capacity to tap into their own natural resourcefulness will have been hugely compromised.
Everyone has a ‘conscious score’ between these two extremes. If we then imagine a life in which we had known nothing but unconditional love and acceptance for who we are since birth – domestically, socially, environmentally, culturally – we would be one hundred percent conscious, one hundred percent true to self, with access to one hundred percent of our innate resourcefulness. We would also be unrecognisable from the people we see ourselves as now. Yet this is the more real ‘us’.
The good news is that we can reclaim every last bit of that. Kissing Consciousness is all about closing this gap; helping people to close the gap wherever they wish to. In the next article I’ll show you how, but before then you can also listen to this recent, fifteen-minute radio interview I gave explaining all of this context in more detail. Listen in at www.kissingconsciousness.com/discovering-magazine
Email: contact@kissingconsciousness.com or call 02045 165 091
You, Me and Discovering: Welcome to The Adventure of Kissing Consciousness
Thursday, July 15th, 2021
Hello! I’m James and I’m thankful to Discovering Magazines for inviting me to connect and share with you through this new column. I’m very excited about what you may get out of it.
I’m the founder and author of Kissing Consciousness, a conscious living movement, and I’ve near-perfected the art of helping people to release the conditioned, and therefore false, limitations, self-judgements and self-constrictions that we pick up on life’s journey. Uncover those and you’ll shine like a beacon.
Although you were born without any sense of any need for self-limitation, this life has set us all our own personal ‘portfolio’ of what Kissing Consciousness calls ‘Human File Permissions’; other people shape us to make us feel parts of us are, or aren’t, allowed. This can be anything big from whether we feel free to pursue the career (or lover) of our choice, to whether we can receive a compliment without blushing.
As well as releasing self-constrictions we’ll also learn some fascinating insights around human nature: Emotions don’t need to be scary in the way we’ve been led to believe. Confidence is nothing to do with being loud, it’s merely honest self-confiding (the clue is in the name; confidence). Genius is available to anyone in any given moment. Stress is impossible without self-judgement creating a conflict with our ‘truth’. Positive thinking is basically just the absence of negative thinking.
The key to all of these is the removal of self-judgement and self-constriction. Self-judgement stops you being honest with yourself (confidence) because the judgement implies you ‘shouldn’t’ be a certain thing. It prevents your ever-available genius because it makes you second-guess yourself. It is the negative thinking that impedes what KC calls ‘Positive (Not) Thinking’. And self-judgements make us fear emotions because the notion of how we ‘shouldn’t’ respond to them (crying, shouting, running) creates anxiety around facing them.
At any time, these life skills are essential not just for surviving but also for thriving; the real mark of health and wellbeing. Throw in this COVID era, which is basically global system failure’s ‘sequel’ to the 2008 global financial crash, plus many other system failure challenges like extreme wealth inequality and mental health pressures, and the value of optimising our self-acceptance, resourcefulness, emotional strength and mental health support is obvious. So, I look forward to sharing with you again and imparting more insights.
Oh yes, the name! It’s from the acronym, ‘Keep it simple, stupid’ (KISS).