The Art of Conscious Change – 10 core principles for supporting genuine change

1. Clarify your intentions – The most important thing is to know the most important thing! As regularly as you can, ask yourself what is it that you deeply want out of your life? Without a vision and sense of values, we don't have a rudder to steer our boat, nor the wind in the sails to give it forward momentum. Were vulnerable to just floating aimlessly along in life, swayed and directed by external circumstances, cultural norms and other’s needs.

We are unlikely to know how to face life’s challenges without any guiding values and intentions about how we want to face and manage adversity e.g life happens for me, not too me, is an example of a value that can help us grow through adversity.

Our life changes and becomes imbued with meaning when we align our actions with our values and intentions.

Knowing what we deeply value also gives us passion, the deep inner drive to reach for what you love and care about. This is internally driven, and gives us the energy, flow, intuition and drive to move towards a clearer vision and a more solid identity.

Values are different to goals – they are how you want to behave as a human being, what you want to stand for, and the qualities you want to bring into your actions. Goals are what you want to achieve. Values are how you want to be and behave. We tend to live in a goal-oriented society, rather than value oriented society. The good thing about values is that we can live by them regardless of whether we reach our goals or not! What we value directs where we put our attention, what we spend our time on, and the choices we make. It profoundly influences our life in conscious and unconscious ways. 

A vision gives us a rudder and wind in our sail to navigate life's oceans.  What is my deepest intention for this day, and at the bigger picture, in my life? What do you value the most? E.g. your health, your emotional well being and happiness, the quality of your friendships or relationships, how you look,  your work, being wealthy, your spiritual development and waking up? What kind of person do you want to be?  e.g. Kind, discerning, initiating, organised, grateful, playful, compassionate, courageous or patient?  How do you want to relate to yourself and others? Once you know what you want, connect with your excitement and desire for it, and then let yourself believe, visualise and imagine it is as possible through all of your 5 senses.

Then make regular contact with your intentions to live true to your values and take action in that direction and attract this into your life.  Where you put your attention grows.

Where you put your attention also strengthens and grows neural pathways. This is how we change our brain, to then change our mind.

The more you connect with your deepest intentions, the more likely you are to attract and enact this into your life. It is that simple!

However, many of us have trouble knowing what we truly value and want, due to various factors such as – peer influence, a lack of self-trust, being too busy or ungrounded to reflect, spending too much time in our heads rather than connecting with our hearts and body, being disconnected to our feelings, not having enough validation in our lives to know that our inner world of feelings, talents, resources and capacities matter. Hence it can help to know the obstacles to knowing what we value and want, so that we can address them. 

In my view, there are 4 important steps in creating a new habit -

Firstly, we need to develop a clear sense of our intentions and goals. Then we need to broaden our lens to connect with the deeper value and motivations behind these intentions – this is the wind in our sail. This step supports a strong foundation for change and provides the fuel that helps us break out of the familiar gravitational pull of our old ways of being, and to overcome the discomfort of stepping out of our comfort zone. 

Secondly, we need to then make clear and specific commitments that will be true to and honour our values and intentions. This involves deciding when, where and how you are going to be true to these intentions. Research has found that when we visualize realizing our goals through all 5 senses with an elevated emotion, we are much more likely to make this goal happen. This creates a future memory, that then sends a signal to our body that it has already happened ahead of time. 

Thirdly, knowing and anticipating the patterns, self-limiting beliefs and obstacles that could get in the way of these goals. 

Fourthly, developing strategies to manage and prevent these obstacles is an important strategy in the realization of intentions. When we visualize in detail ahead of time managing these challenges, again research shows that the chances of realizing our goals is vastly increased. 

2. Cultivate resources – It can make a huge difference to your well being when you practice putting your attention towards the things that make you feel good, grounded, relaxed and most like the self you like to feel.  A lot of the time we focus our attention on our thoughts  about what isn’t working (either in ourselves or others),  on our worries about the future, or what we don’t want (psychologists call this the negativity bias). This becomes a recipe for generating stress (high states of sympathetic activation), overwhelm and collapse (dorsal vagal shut down states) and attracting the very things we are wanting to avoid.

What happens when do you turn your attention to the things in your life that support and nurture you, that are working, that bring you connection, satisfaction, and that your grateful for and appreciate? Can you notice, feel and take in the little things in your life that bring pleasure and goodness e.g. the feeling of sun on your skin, the sound of birds or rain on  a room, a beautiful flower, a delicious meal, the comfort of your bed, the support of the seat, the satisfaction of the pause at the end of an out-breath, someone’s warm eyes and smile, a nice complement.

This brings us into a state of safety and connection, mediated by the ventral vagal complex. Spend some time and think of (or write down) all the inner and outer supports you have in your life that resource you. This maybe animals, places of nature, activities that you enjoy or people that you care for and feel cared by.  Then let yourself bring up one of these images and allow yourself to remember via all your senses (sight, sound, smell ect) the last time you experienced this resource. Let yourself relive the feeling of this and then notice how your body responds for 30 seconds or more. Often this practice allows the body to relax, become more grounded and helps discharge stress. See if you can make it a practice to regularly 'take in the good'. The more time you are able to bring regulation into the nervous system.

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3. Nurture your relationships – The need for human connection and attachment is considered by many to be our deepest most fundamental human need. Research has found that being connected is one of the greatest protective factors against physical, emotional and spiritual dis-ease.  Hence it can help to develop some skills to nurture your relationships via learning to communicate, listen and repair ruptures well.  It can make a huge difference if we can find one or two people in our life that we can trust enough to be authentic, vulnerable and open with e.g  to express your fears, hopes and needs with.

Vulnerability and authenticity is the birthplace of intimacy, true belonging and courage, and you can only truly belong if your willing to be authentic and risk showing your vulnerability. This practice requires you to be willing to work on accepting yourself! Do you express your needs for support, or let in support when it is offered to you? Can you risk expressing your boundaries, needs, feelings and thoughts with people close to you in a clear non-reactive way? Do you also show interest and listen to others with an open, curious, non-judgemental heart without going into defensiveness, justification and explanation? Can you repair a rupture in a friendship or relationship by  deep listening, saying sorry, forgiving someone for being imperfect or acknowledging and own your part in a conflict or disagreement without getting defensive or blaming of the other. These basic skills can make a huge difference to the quality of your relationship.

4. Befriend your emotions – Micheal  brown says we need to ‘get better at feeling, rather than trying to feel better’. So, how do you normally relate with your emotions? Do you fight, judge, hold onto, or try to fix or figure out your feelings in an attempt to control, overcome or reject them? These are common ways we relate to our emotions, that often perpetuates them into deeper layers of suffering.

However, paradoxically when we can learn to stay fully present to our feelings in our body (without going into our minds and associated memories and stories), by recognising and allowing them, we often discover that they tend to flow through us in waves, often in a matter of a few minutes. They arise, peak and then subside. However, when we fight, over identify with  and struggle with our feelings they often get stuck and congeal into dense and heavy moods, that over time become traits and identities (I’m a sad person) rather than passing states.

As the Buddhists say, suffering is the avoidance of pain. What we resist persists and we give power too! When you avoid your feelings they don’t just disappear, they go down into the basement and pump iron, getting even stronger!  Noticing and naming our feelings gets our frontal lobes on line and calms down the reptilian 'emotion driven' primitive part of our brain. When we can name it, we can tame it and when we can see it, we don’t have to be it.  However, the practice of staying with our disturbing experience is counter-instinctual and counter-cultural.

HAVE YOU GOT THE ULTIMATE TRAUMA THERAPY CHECKLIST YET??--

Our conditioned and natural instinct for most of us is to seek positive experiences, get away from painful feelings and sensations, or else to marinate in our thoughts (over analyze and over think) about why we are feeling this way and how to resolve or fix it.  These approaches with our feelings tend to keep us looping on the hampster wheel going around and round in circles without any change.

However, the path of growth involves learning to become aware of and then to ‘be present with’ these unpleasant sensations and emotions (often in a titrated and safe way at first), to breathe into and hang with them, without getting caught up in any analysis or any story about them. –e.g. “Why am I feeling this way”; “There’s something wrong with me”, “I shouldn’t be feeling this way”, or remembering all the other memories and associations of feeling this way.  Can you do the counter-instinctual move to recognise, name,  allow and be present to the intensity of these painful feelings and sensations, and refrain from any attempt to go into your thoughts about them e.g. figuring them out, judging them, fixing or jumping to conclusions about them.

Once named, we can even let go of the label, and simply sit with the intense wave of our feelings at the sensation level and let the wisdom and natural action tendency inherent within the feeling flow through us to completion. To go one step deeper, listen to the message in your feelings – what are they here to tell you- about what you need, what's out of balance, or what needs attention or completion? 

Also keep in mind, some of the intensity of the feeling you may have about a current  person (or trigger) maybe because something in your implicit memory from the past has been activated without you knowing it. Its what we could call a double wammy.  Hence, it can also be very important to ask the question when your triggered, ‘is anything in the present moment upset reminding me of something in my past that is still unresolve and amplifying my reation’? This process takes  a lot of commitment to  self- inquiry, curiosity, love for the truth, courage and self-compassion.

However, the more we can do this, the less likely we are to be reactive and to confuse  and  project our history into and with the present moment. Terry real says –‘ there is no such thing as an over reaction. Its just that what you’re reacting too is behind you rather than infront of you’!  In my view, true unconditional confidence comes from befriending  and owning all of our feelings and experience. If we are not afraid of our feelings, we are no longer afraid of life, because facing life fully requires feeling fully. The only way out is through!  

5. Become embodied – When we inhabit our bodies, we inhabit ourselves. When we can live more and more in our bodies, we gain access to deeper levels of awareness, realness, wisdom, groundedness, emotional intelligence and aliveness.  The belly and internal organs (viscera) have millions of neural fibres webbed through them, that send information back to the brain about what we feel, desire and need.

This is called the enteric nervous system (known as the second brain), and it is this ‘gut feeling’ that lets us know if we feel safe, threatened, happy, sad, angry or connected before any thoughts kick in. The body is the place where we discover our experiential truth, and is the launching place of true aliveness, presence and change. When we sense our feelings in our body, the natural dynamism of the feeling will unfold, leading us to right action and or to a natural sense of completion and release. 

Insight alone often doesn’t lead to change. But learning to deeply feel, and sense our bodies leads to natural change. Why?  Because, if we are numbed out, and disconnected from our bodies we have little access to our sensations and feelings, which are the vital information that navigates us through life and tells us what we need, value or is out of balance.

Without  this body awareness, we are at risk of becoming lost, and only guided by our rational, over civilized, conditioned mind, which is often full of should’s, “supposed too’s”,  concepts and rules that have been internalized by our culture and families. We are at risk of becoming one dimensional, black and white and living from our conditioning rather than the organismic aliveness of our bodies and feelings.

Also, when we can locate and notice our feelings in our body, we often discover our feelings become a lot more tolerable and contained. So when your angry, sad or happy,  ask yourself “How do I know I’m angry, sad or happy”. “Is there a place in my body where I feel this?, and “can I allow this to be here for now and let it  spread into my arms and legs and whole body?”  Body awareness gives us a break from being lost in our thoughts, brings us into the NOW, connects us to our senses, slows us down and  helps our emotions become more contained and manageable, so that we can then listen to them and use them as guides for right action. 

Continue reading here for Principles 6 to 10.

Peace & Blessing,
Noel Haarburger - Embodied Processing Trainer.
More info on Embodied Processing HERE

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