Conscious Living is the embodiment of exercising your absolute free will. It means actively choosing at each moment of our lives what we eat, drink, think, wear, how we live, engage with and even avoid other people. It is more than mindfulness or awareness because conscious living brings all our senses to interact to create the life that we desire.
A study conducted by Harvard psychologists Matthew A. Killingsworth and Daniel T. Gilbert (1) found that nearly half of us (47%) are thinking about something else rather than what we are doing. That’s right, we spend roughly half our time not even focusing on what we are doing. Described as ‘Mind Wandering’ it’s the time we spend thinking (or worrying) about everything else rather than the task at hand. Have you ever found having driving but can’t remember much about the past ten minutes or half hour? That’s ‘Mind Wandering’ and it’s a state that we can exist in all day long.
Even more gobsmacking was an online survey in 2017 by retail giant Marks & Spenser in Britain, which revealed that a stunning 96% out of 3,000 people (2) considered themselves to be living life on autopilot. Think about that – 96% of people are just going through the motions of life, never really living. The average respondent said ‘yes’ to four things every day that they didn’t really want to do. In fact, they knew they shouldn’t but at the same time, didn’t want to let people down. A final revelation of the study was that we make about 15 decisions a day on autopilot – and over the course of a lifetime, that adds up to 250,000 decisions that we’ve never really made – just gone along with ‘because that’s what we always do!’.
This feeling of living life on autopilot is interesting because it is a phenomenon that makes people lose years of their life only to one day look back and wonder where the time went. It’s easy to get lulled into this state of consciousness – modern life trains us from a very early age to be ‘good’ members of society and to follow the rules. Go to school, go to college, get a job, save, marry, raise a family and die. These are the rules we are taught from a very early age and so we grow up, part of this collective consciousness, where if you dare to be different the immediate reaction of everyone else, and even yourself, is to drag you back into the familiar, but mundane world that you inhabit.

Everyday life is filled with distractions. The ‘system’ has become very good at giving us distractions – fleeting moments of entertainment to distract you from the meaningless of life. TV shows, social media, reality shows and celebrity gossip are some of the means of keeping people occupied enough to go to work and dull enough to never break free. A constant barrage of negative news ensures that our brains – hardwired to keep us safe – are in a constant state of stress and fear and therefore the overwhelming urge is to do what every one else is doing. Individuality is discouraged and the thin veneer of being different possibly extends only to the clothes you choose to wear. The survival instinct in our brain means that most of us choose the safety of the herd rather than stand out in our own right.
It’s for this very reason that we all sleepwalk into a system where you graduate, take out a huge mortgage for a house, spend the rest of your life working to pay off that mortgage and die without ever really having lived. And this is the way those in power want it. The more work you do, the less time you have to consider the ethical questions of the system.
The concept of Conscious Living seeks to shake up the life stupor we can all find ourselves in. What then are the steps we can take to move towards this way of life?
The first action is deciding that we are going to question everything that we do and think. Every time we have a thought, we have to consciously catch ourselves and ask ‘Is this thought bringing me towards the life I want?’. If not, then we replace it with another thought that is. We do the same with our actions. Even the simple act of making tea becomes a conscious decision – we decide that we really require a break from our activities, or that we are thirsty and so we have tea. What we don’t do, is just have tea because all our co-workers are having tea or because we have tea at this time every damn day!
The critical aspect of Conscious Living is the continual process of questioning ourselves. That is composed of two key elements that merge into every decision we take 1. Our Brain and 2. Our Intuitive Gut
1. Our Brain
We are gifted with one of the most complex super computers on the planet with a display that gives us crystal clear images all within our own minds. These images are the past, present and future and we are often rolling one seamlessly into another to come with all types of scenarios. When we say our brain, we mean the brain that chatters all day long. It never stops! Our chatterbox brain is our most vocal defender and our worst critic. It wants to keep you safe and does everything it can to help you avoid perceived future pain.
From the Archives: How to Elevate your Consciousness
The problem with our rationalising brain is that it defaults to worse case scenarios. Most of the time, it will throw up an image of the worst possible outcome so that we may recognise the danger in an action and step away from anything that is uncomfortable.
On the positive side, our brain is a machine or a muscle and it can be trained. We can train ourselves to think differently, to behave differently, to actually fire different brain receptors. Latest research suggests the brain does not know the difference between a past memory and something we consciously think about. Our brains cannot tell the difference between something real or imaginary. This is important because if our brains are part of the controlling unit of our body, and the brain receptors and neurons are firing and wiring producing different emotional states, which produce different moods in us, which produce different experiences for us, which make us who we are – then we can literally think ourselves into a new state of being.
2. Our Intuitive Gut
Our gut, or more accurately our microbiome, is a collection of bacteria and viruses that live within and on our body. There are trillions of them – they outnumber us so much so that our cells are actually a minority inhabitant of our bodies. And yet they work for the most part in perfect harmony carrying out important functions like digestion that enable us to obtain energy from food.
Our gut bacteria have being shown to have a huge influence in how we feel, both emotionally and physically. An imbalanced gut, as science is finding out, can be the source of depression, anxiety or any number of ailments that we would traditionally have ascribed as problems with the brain. Instead the brain-gut connection is now recognised to be of utmost importance in how we feel and behave with our gut bacteria producing many of the chemicals that produce the ‘feelings’ that the brain tells us to feel. This process also applies in reverse – a bad gut microbiome can send signals to the brain that tells it to feel sad or fearful or anxious and so the process can become self-reinforcing.

Conscious Living does not mean only using one of these two paths, or ignoring our gut feeling and siding with our brain process – the whole point of deciding to live consciously is that we decide to engage all our our available resources in making a decision that produces the best outcome. That might be the best outcome for us, our community or the environment, but nevertheless, it is a decisions that we have made deliberately using all of the resources we have.
The Process of Spiritual Healing
We may have a habit of listening to our gut feeling instead of our brain. Or vice versa. Conscious living says we need to recognise that and if we have found ourselves unhappy because of this reliance on our gut or our brain, then we consiously decide to change it.
The whole process of Conscious Living becomes much easier once we begin to get used to the idea of spending a little time thinking about what we do. This could mean that we think about the effect each activity has on us, whether it makes us happy and if it brings us another step closer to where we want to be. If the answer to any of these questions is no, then we decide not to do it anymore.
Once we take these first steps, we quickly find that our thought processes begin to change. We begin to recognise different things about ourselves and the potential we hold within. We become comfortable with the process of change. This starts very slowly and almost imperceptibly. Small victories like ditching the cereal at breakfast or forcing ourselves to exercise because we consciously decide to do so, bring about a change in our attitude.
This is the magical thing about conscious living. It brings us into a state that has as its natural conclusion the best possible life for us and for everyone else. If we are truly consciously living, it is very difficult to be unhappy because we understand that any negative decisions we take come from fear or habit. Conscious Living demands we change those things. And when we change one thing, we change everything. Those small victories in what we eat produce different emotional states in our bodies. Those different emotional states in our bodies produce a sense of awakening to the toxicity that surrounds everyday life. That sense of awakening, of becoming an individual that is connected to the All and understands the All, is the true practice of Conscious Living in all its forms.
(1) https://science.sciencemag.org/content/330/6006/932.abstract
(2) https://science.sciencemag.org/content/330/6006/932.abstracthttps://corporate.marksandspencer.com/documents/reports-results-and-publications/autopilot-britain-whitepaper.pdf