Conscience Choice

Today we explore the power of choice and how it shapes our lives. Our conversations often center around the themes of time and choice. We believe that anxiety over lacking time often leads people to feel they lack choices in how to live or use the time they have more purposefully.

Reinforcing the Basics: Before tackling deeper topics like self-esteem and identity, we first want to reinforce the basics. We urge people not to push themselves too hard or cause themselves harm. Think of it like yoga - no one will ask you to stretch beyond your limits. We want to focus on the foundations before concerning ourselves too much with appearances.

For example, we can spend more time making cosmetic repairs on our lives rather than fixing core issues. It's easy to get caught up in projecting an image rather than doing the real inner work. The bells and whistles don't matter if we don't put them to good use in practicing mindfulness.

Owning Our Choices: An impactful insight from our last discussion was realizing "I'm a person this happened to" versus "I'm a person who has a choice." When things go wrong, we can choose our response rather than feeling victimized. Of course, trauma is very real and the choice to move beyond it is not easy or simple. But through a process of mending, we can take responsibility for our lives rather than remain trapped by our pasts.

This relates to how people often blame their upbringings for their problems. Yet children from the same household make vastly different choices. We have the power to respond to our environments even if they were less than ideal.

Final Thoughts: The first step is mindful acceptance - recognizing what happened without approving of it. Then we can make the choice to free ourselves rather than poison ourselves with resentment. We find that sending blessings out to others has a purifying effect on our own souls. Like a stream that purifies itself by flowing over rocks, we can cleanse ourselves by conscious positive action.

We'll explore more on this topic of choice and purification in our next discussion. For now, we hope these ideas resonate and empower you to shape your life and time more purposefully through the choices available to you.

To explore more of this concept, check out our related podcast episode.