Conscious Communication
As human beings, the greatest gift we have at our disposal, can also be the greatest weapon – Words. We can heal ourselves, others and the world with words, yet words can hurt ourselves and others, and destroy the world. Because of the pressure of living in the world cultures that we have been raised in, we have mimicked and learned dysfunctional and entirely inappropriate ways of relating, not only to others, but with ourselves. Most of us are unaware that the way we relate to ourselves and each other is entirely distorted and unnatural.
We have been conditioned from birth by the environment and its dysfunctional systems, to hook into a fear based mentality, and react. Generally, the cultures of the world exist in survival mode, in a pattern of fight or flight which is a react and defend mentality. A healthy way of relating is when we feel free to express our true feelings, without fear, to speak from the heart, to communicate honestly, are emotionally stable and are able to respond, instead of react.
Conscious Communication requires TRUST in ourselves, in our Truth, and in our capacity to express this in a conscious way. Reacting is a defense mechanism and responding is an expression of the felt sense. To react is to attack and defend. Response is a balanced, calm and stable communication, speaking directly to the emotions with feelings being expressed consciously and mindfully. Reacting uses language which disconnects, finger points, blames and shames. The language of response is connected, centered, empathic and compassionate.
Trust has been broken, over and over again, and we have become numb with the pain of such experiences and so have created a hard outer shell to defend the soft and vulnerable core of our Being. This hard outer shell keeps others out, but our true loving nature is locked away. We have become prisoners of ourselves. Fundamentally, we are Love. Even though this may sound a cliché, it is the truth. We are Love. However, this natural and organic core foundation of our Being may feel lost to us. It is not lost, but deeply buried under layers of conditioning which has taught us to survive, at all costs. We are in ‘fight or flight’ mode the majority of the time, ‘surviving’ in a ‘hostile’ environment, where it appears that every man/woman is looking out for themselves.
However, if we bring ourselves right into the present moment, we can ask this; “Do we have to remain in survival mode, or can we dare to explore how it would feel to trust, to be open, transparent, and most importantly, to risk sharing from the heart, communicating from the foundation of Love which forms the core of each one of us? To make this shift requires courage and a yearning to know and experience true peace, at the deepest level of our Being. Courage and yearning lead to an inner-shift – one which can and will transform our lives, if we dare to risk all for Love. What is there to lose? Only that which imprisons us. Self love, loving relationship with the Self, is the key to our freedom.
To embark upon such a noble quest will require a radical re-evaluation of our relationships, a conscious encounter with our wounding, an exploration and clearing of our psychological history, and a period of ‘de-conditioning’ from the ingrained patterns of fear, defense, attack and survival which has accumulated over our life time, perhaps even, life times. We are blessed to live in times where FREEDOM is offered to us on a plate. It is ours only for the choosing. Never before in modern history have we been totally free to make life serving choices.
We are no longer obliged, by religion, culture or any other external pressures, to exist in life-denying regimes, that are not even our own. We have inherited our ‘reactive’, defended, survival mentality from our ancestors. The script which forms the imprint of our relating, belongs to generations that have gone before us and the times they lived in. We are literally living in the past, no matter how modern we believe ourselves and our lives to be, or how ‘liberated’ we feel our relationships are. As we FREE ourselves from dysfunctional relating, we also free the generations to come.
CHOICE is the great gift bestowed upon us by the Age we live in. You have the choice to LIVE or to exist, to survive or to feel ALIVE with the joy of living. Fundamentally, to claim our humanitarian right to freedom and choice, or should we say, reclaim this humanitarian right, we must first come into right relationship with ourselves, which automatically creates right relationship with other, and the world.