A Personal Example Of Living Consciously

Living consciously is being able to be aware of what you are thinking and feeling when a stimulus occurs and then creating a space between that stimulus and your response through self awareness. When I shared this idea with many people prior to my own inner-transformation or self transcendence they told me it was impossible. However, I have now experienced this ability many times and wanted to share with all of you one such occurrence this past Friday.

This past Friday I had someone working at my home and they needed to borrow a garden hose so I went ahead and lent them a hose with a brand new brass nozzle on the end. This is a hose that is fully operational and does not leak with a proper nozzle on it. I make mention of the type of hose I lent this gentleman because I have high standards for the things I have and how they operate. It might be fine for some people to place their finger on the end of a leaking hose to direct the water flow but that would never be acceptable to me. My desire is to always maintain and fix things so they work properly. 

Shortly after lending the workman my garden hose he drops it right on my concrete driveway with no awareness as to the impact on the brass nozzle. This is one way garden hoses come in need of immediate repair. People drop them on hard surfaces and then they end up breaking and leaking. Upon seeing him drop the hose on my concrete driveway and hearing the brass nozzle strike the ground I was immediately triggered.

A stimulus was provided that caused me to become upset and angry. In this process of the stimulus creating thoughts within me and emotions. I began to become mindful of my inner world which was angry. At this point observing my mind by looking in instead of out time appeared to slow down.  By creating this gap between my stimulus and response through self awareness a negative reaction which in the past would have included expressing anger acting irrational never happened. 

The stimulus of the workman dropping the hose  on the concrete triggered within me thoughts that then triggered emotions which was going to trigger a negative angry response but mindfulness or self awareness stopped me from acting in a way that I would have regretted afterwards. This is the power of inner transformation or self transcendence and it unlike what I was told by others can be learned and applied. The problem is that we often forget just how long things took us to learn like writing the alphabet in print and script for example. Think back at how much effort it took to learn how to write all the letters of the alphabet in upper and lower case.

Now while this experience was happening for me all in a relatively short period of time I had amazingly powerful feeling come over me. It was the liberating feeling of being able to take control of my mind that once only ran on autopilot. Being able to observe my mind and delay an immediate response made me feel like I was completely liberated from my mind controlling me. The gap I was now looking at between stimulus and response made me feel as if I had broken the chains of the past and was connecting with something far more powerful and desirable. 

The reward that I experienced was so deep and profound that I did not respond or reply. I felt like I was exactly where I needed to be and in that moment the garden hose no longer mattered because I tapped into something far more meaningful which is being able to choose a better personal reality.