Your Path Begins Within You, Not Without

Only you can choose via your head, heart, and soulPhoto by Yulia Gadalina on Unsplash

Everyone faces certain big questions along the way. Who are you? What do you desire? Why are you doing that? Sometimes these questions feel invasive. Other times, you can answer them with certainty. Most of the time, you need to look within to truly know what the answers are.

None of the answers to these questions are static. They change. That’s because change is the only constant in the universe. Who you are, what you desire, why you do what you do shifts, changes, grows, and evolves.

Unfortunately, change terrifies people. That’s the primary reason for sexism, racism, and any and all forms of systemic inequality. The change represented causes feelings of loss, abandonment, and uncertainty that some just cannot accept. Apart from voting in elections, boycotting bad business, and attending protests, there’s little to nothing you or I can do about these people and their issues with change.

However, you can stay on top of who, what, where, how, and why you are. It’s just a matter of practicing active conscious awareness. That lets you make choices and decisions to seek, find, and travel any given path. Your path, whatever it is, begins within you.

Get to know your mind

All human beings are of three minds. The unconscious mind is not within your control. It’s where your heart beats, lungs breathe, neurons fire, and so on. Unchecked, it does its job, and you live.

The subconscious mind is like a computer’s hard drive. This is where you store your beliefs, values, memories, and habits. Like a hard drive, things just sit there until you search for them and access them. Also, beliefs, values, and habits become the software that runs the computer, and can get infected with malware, viruses, and other undesirables.

The conscious mind is your ability to engage with the world within and the world without, here and now. It only works in the present, right now, because it’s your active mind. In the computer analogy, it’s more like RAM or any open document you’re working on.

When you practice active conscious awareness, you practice mindfulness. Mindfulness lets you engage both your six senses and your inner thoughts, feelings, intentions, approach, and actions. With mindfulness, you can look at what’s in your subconscious mind and examine your beliefs, values, memories, and habits.

When you engage your subconscious mind consciously, you open yourself to being an active participant in change. Ultimately, you open yourself to choosing a path by reaching within you.

Photo by Valeria Reverdo on UnsplashYour path begins within you

When you choose to ask a person out, buy a car, apply for a job, start a business, or anything else big or small, the path this puts you on begins within you.

To be fair, outside influences, information, and people, places, and things can show you options. How can you know about a job opportunity at any given company if you don’t use outside information to learn about it?

The biggest downside to formal education is that it only focuses on what’s without. I’m not knocking learning history (please, for the love of sanity, learn some damned history), or scientific facts, or math, and so on. The trouble is that formal education doesn’t address looking within and seeing the impact of what you learn on your mindset/headspace/psyche self, let alone what is embedded in your subconscious mind.

Hence, people have no idea how to look within. Because of this, people are easily lost, disempowered, and seeking outside influence, validation, and the like. It’s good that we have all those resources available, but when you don’t know how to look within, you absorb like a sponge. Before you know it, you hold beliefs and values that aren’t genuine or authentic to you.

That can lead to uncertainty, depression, and worse. This lack of education for looking within you is why the world is in a massive mental health crisis that nobody in a leadership position gives a shit about.

You, however, can make a different choice.

Choose to be mindful and start by looking within you

Active conscious awareness is a choice. That’s why so many people are seemingly asleep at the switch. They don’t choose to think for themselves, and thus allow their subconscious to do the driving.

Rote and routine have their time and place. Certain habits on autopilot via the subconscious mind are great, like brushing your teeth, practicing good hygiene, minding your diet and exercise, making your bed, and so on. Nobody, however, can live by rote, routine, and automation all the time.

You can’t choose any path if you don’t make use of applied mindfulness. That begins from within. To start, you must become aware of what you’re thinking, what and how you’re feeling, what your intentions are, the positivity or negativity of your approach, and what actions you’re taking. If any of those don’t match how you desire them to be, you can now make choices and decisions to change them.

Nothing is written in stone. Everything grows, changes, and evolves, like it or not. You have the ability to seek, find, and/or create paths for your life experience. Learning about options for paths you can take can come from without, but walking the path starts entirely within you.

This is very much a superpower. Even when faced with adversity, you can employ it to choose who, what, where, how, and why you desire to be. Yes, it takes time and energy. But when all is said and done, don’t you prefer to make your own choices and decisions over allowing someone random to do it for you?

This is the seventh-hundred-twenty-first (721) exploration of my Pathwalking philosophy. These weekly essays are my ideas for – and experiences with – applying mindfulness and positivity to walk along a chosen path of life to consciously create reality.

I share this journey as part of my desire to make a difference in this world and empower as many people as I can with conscious reality creation.

Thank you for joining me. Feel free to repost and share this.

The first year of Pathwalking, including expanded ideas, is available here. Check out my author website for the rest of my published fiction and nonfiction works.

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