Written by: Phillip Golding, Executive Contributor
Executive Contributors at Brainz Magazine are handpicked and invited to contribute because of their knowledge and valuable insight within their area of expertise.
Who is in Charge of Your Mind? As human beings, we have the capacity for Conscious-Awareness that gives us our dynamic creative power, but the full potential of this power lies mostly dormant until we deliberately wake it up. So what keeps this power dormant and how do we wake it up?
We operate on different frequencies, depending on our state of consciousness at any given point in time. This has a lot to do with whether we are operating (thinking/feeling/acting) from fear and vulnerability or from a state of acceptance, openness, and connectedness. In other words, are you operating from ego or a genuine state of Conscious-Awareness? The question, “who is in charge of your mind?” also implies that you are more than your mind. It implies that there is a dimension of your being that is higher than your mind that can encapsulate your mind as its manager and guardian – the one who we actually need to be in the driver’s seat of our lives.
What is the Ego?
Ego can be regarded as our potential of consciousness, but it is not yet dynamically aware. Ego is still largely captured by and serving our mind’s conditioning, beliefs, and primal instinctual reactions ‒ all of which are often below our level of consciousness. This is problematic, because much of our conditioning was created when we were children, particularly social conditioning. Therefore, much of our operating system was created before we were ten years old. Important personal skills, such as self-reflection, are hard for the ego, because it struggles to get above the mind and observe the mind from a detached perspective. Such a perspective is essential for insight and personal growth.
Optimally, our conditioned mind needs to be serving our Conscious-Awareness, not the other way around. We need the mind for its conditioning so that we, as Conscious-Awareness, can get on with managing our everyday life without having to think about all those things we want to be able to do automatically, like reading, writing, talking etc. Unfortunately, a lot of our conditioning is not very well programmed, and is more of a hindrance than a help, so much so that our capacity for Conscious-Awareness gets stuck within the limitations of our more survival orientated mind. Our capacity for Conscious-Awareness remains the servant of the mind and limited to being ego.
The ego also finds it hard to see the bigger picture, so it often lacks personal skills such as balance, inclusiveness, and open-mindedness. Often, we are able to operate on a high level in one area, such as business, but lack awareness and functionality in areas such as empathy and, therefore relationships. It depends on how our conditioning is structured. As a result, the ego approach to life tends to keep us stuck in negative, self-defeating life patterns. In other words, the ego is not what you want in the driver’s seat of your life.
What keeps our consciousness stuck in this ego dimension is a lack of self-knowledge, but also our often unconscious fears and insecurities and our ego defenses that try to hide our vulnerabilities from the world around us.
The Ego’s Dilemma
To awaken our consciousness out of its ego slumber, we must be willing and able to look squarely at ourselves and then know what to do with what we find. All too often though, when we try to do this, we are pushed back by our own ego defenses, that not only hide our vulnerabilities from the world, but also from our own awareness. To lift the lid of our own vulnerabilities can be like opening up Pandora’s Box. It is essential that we do so however, because our fears and insecurities contain trapped parts of our own greater potential that we must set free if we want to become the person who we know we can be.
So what is this fire-breathing dragon that is waiting for us in the dungeons of our mind? Ultimately it is various and often complex layers of self-rejection, buried so deep that we struggle to recognise it for what it is. To the degree that we grow up in an environment where love is conditional, is the degree that our conditioning will be based on self-rejection. This self-rejection then pulls down our frequency like a heavy weight, leaving our ego to somehow construct a sense of self-worth from unsuitable raw materials. This, in turn, leaves our self-worth vulnerable to further impacts from ongoing inevitable life-challenges. To try to compensate, we lean more heavily on the world around us and less on our own self-esteem foundation. Out-of-control materialism and relationship break down on all levels; personal, community, business, international, are examples of the consequences of the ego’s misplaced attachments and confusion.
In reality, that fire-breathing dragon is just ourselves as a small child surrounded by our primal defenses designed to enable us to psychologically survive, like a scar that has formed around our heart. However, just because we survived, it does not mean that our psychological wounds have really healed. That is the job of our own conscious adult self, ourselves as Conscious-Awareness, which can transcend the unaware, conditioned mind.
Awakening Your Ego’s Real Potential
The key to transforming the ego into awareness is Acceptance. This may seem too simple, but it is essential to comprehend the true depth of Acceptance ‒ where it comes from and the essential role that it plays. Acceptance is a quality of Unconditional Love ‒ the ultimate force of healing and awareness. Self-rejection is the product of coming to believe that we are somehow not good enough being a human being. When we were infants, children, teenagers, young adults, we did the best we could within the environment we were given and the awareness that we had possession of at any given time. We could not avoid getting confused, making mistakes, being hurt, and hurting others. We got confused when we thought that we had to live up to some arbitrary standard in order to be worthy. In reality, our worth has nothing to do with any of this. In reality, our worth is absolute. You exist, therefore you are worthy, and this fundamental reality takes a lot of contemplation. Accepting yourself as you are, stands unshakable in this foundational reality. Accepting the reality of your humanness means that when you make a mistake, it does not mean you have failed and are therefore, somehow unworthy. It simply means that you had an experience of being human and are now given the opportunity to learn something useful from that experience. It is simply an opportunity to evolve. There is nothing to be ashamed of. There is nothing to reject yourself about. In addition, with the power of self-acceptance, we are less likely to feel like a victim and blame others. It is easier to be self-reflective and self-responsible. Acceptance makes it much easier to own our mistakes.
When we accept ourselves as we are, it makes it possible and manageable to face ourselves, because Acceptance provides an antidote to self-rejection and the suffocating false pride that tries to compensate for it. When doing our best to accept ourselves as we are, we can soon feel the difference between these two opposing mind-states. We can repeatedly experience the sanctuary of self-Acceptance compared to the pain of self-rejection.
Make Friends with Your Emotions
Here we discover another important insight. Your emotions, no matter how painful they may be, are your friend because they are informing yourself, as Conscious-Awareness, where your mind is confused and wounded. Acceptance opens the door to your heart, which is your Conscious-Awareness. You now have the power of self-reflection. Not only that, you are now a representative of the very Unconditional Love that you have always needed throughout your life. You have literally become your own forever sanctuary and parent. This is the heart of the practice of Mindfulness. Therefore, if you want to free up more of your potential, pay attention to your emotional pain. Most of the time it is pointing to where you need to do some renovation work on your mind’s conditioning. Sometimes painful emotions are telling you what you need to change in the world around you in order to better take care of yourself. Knowing when to do some work on ourselves or change something in the world around us requires discernment/clarity. Discernment/clarity requires self-reflection.
The Power of Acceptance
Therefore, Acceptance is not a shallow surface thing. It is a fundamental power. Accepting yourself as you are is not self-indulgent, it is compassionate self-responsibility. You are learning to fill yourself up from the inside without having to take from anyone else. You are learning to build your own solid foundation of self-worth and resilience.
Those who grow up with highly balanced and functional conditioning, that enables them to make self-caring and self-empowering choices in their lives, seem to have it easy in life. Their positive conditioning enables them to create and attract love, harmony, and abundance. They rarely even have to think about self-acceptance, because they are actually living it. The rest of us are left to grasp the significance of this fundamental Law of Life through the fog of our confused conditioning, and learn how to be the student of Acceptance. As students, we are learning to grasp that Acceptance must be unconditional. We have to practice what many would regard as a radical form of self-acceptance. We have to grasp that we need to place this essential self-care practice at the center of our lives for the rest of our lives in order to continue to set free our real potential and have the life that we truly want, because we are the ones who are creating our lives.
Be the Power of Acceptance
As the student of Acceptance, you are learning to accept yourself as you are, and therefore becoming aware of and learning to overcome your sometimes subtle, and other times crippling self-rejection. You are learning how to no longer give your power away by being a victim. You are learning that if your life lacks balance, if you are neglecting yourself, if you attract conflict, if you frequently get caught in your pride, you can accept your right to be human and compassionately turn toward your deepest vulnerabilities and see the opportunity to bring your open heart to your confused and wounded human self. You are learning that changing yourself for the better, changes your life for the better.
You are also learning to accept what Life brings you, because everything now is a useful experience that helps you to learn and grow. You come to realize that you don’t have to always get it right. Instead, you just have to have a go and learn from repeated experience. Getting it right is then inevitable, because self-Acceptance motivates you to not give up. You also soon discover that you are gaining a thing called wisdom. People start asking you how you do what you do, and you are able to tell them, because you consciously built that skill into your own mind.
So get into your power by being a student of Acceptance.
Phillip Golding, Executive Contributor Brainz Magazine
Phil has been on his own personal development journey since 1984. He overcame chronic depression and PTSD, which motivated him to continue to learn about emotional healing, psychology, and self-awareness. Phil’s qualifications and experience cover general psychology, existential/spiritual/transpersonal psychology and mindfulness and a post-graduate degree in psychology. With his personal and professional experience, Phil developed the powerful and effective mindfulness-based “Five Step Process,” which has been the foundation of his psychotherapy practice and mindfulness/self-awareness teaching. Phil is also an author and is in the process of completing the second edition of his book, “Five Steps to Freedom.”
