Conscious Feeling

AJ Dahiya - Conscious feeling

About a year ago I had surgery. I was fortunate to have a wonderful team that, even all this time later, I still recall with tremendous gratitude. Under their skillful care, the difficulties I faced for some time were healed. 

Lately, I’ve been thinking in particular of the anesthesiologist, whose job is to put the patient into a state of unconsciousness. While I am an advocate for conscious living, in the setting of an operating theatre unconsciousness is welcome on the part of the patient. Why? Because in such a state one is no longer in a state of wakefulness and therefore one can no longer feel. 

To truly feel is only possible when we are awake. 

While unconsciousness is welcome when we do not want to feel the pain of the surgeon’s blade, in the realm of social good, compassion, and activism we want the polar opposite – we want to be as conscious as we possibly can.

To be conscious means to be awake, alive, and aware. An alternate definition is to be deliberate and acting with intentionality. Weaving all these thoughts together, then, we can surmise that to feel requires us to be awake and intentional. 

Yet the world is awash in unconscious feelers; those who form strong opinions and become emotionally reactive, clinging to a particular position without ever really examining the identities, fears, and emotional underpinning of those assertions. 

So often, we beat back the feelings we deem “negative,” disallowing ourselves the opportunity to examine or learn from them. In doing so we deny the intelligence of our emotions and create the conditions for disconnection. Unconscious feelers are numb; it is easy to become apathetic and deny injustice if we are continuously training our hearts to reject that which is uncomfortable. 

To develop conscious feeling is not an invitation to become swept out to sea in the current of your emotions. Rather, it is an opportunity to sit with your reactions, impulses, and predilections so that you can see them clearly. 

As Victor Frankl famously wrote: “Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.”

Never Waste A Good Crisis

The New York winter was beginning and I had just made a decision that was going to change life as I knew it. After a deep and prolonged time of contemplation, I came to a realisation — I had grown as much as I was going to grow as a monk. The time had come to hang up the robes in search of the next chapter.

I was just about to turn 28. I didn’t have a bank account. No drivers licence. Thousands of miles from home. A handful of friends. A thin support system. No education.

I felt unstable, unsure and untethered. Could I start a career with my background? Where would I live? How would I pay rent? Who would take me seriously — I only had one outfit that wasn’t the saffron garb of a monk. I turned to a mentor who I respected deeply and revealed my heart. I expressed the deep inner turmoil and turbulence I was feeling.

“Never waste a good crisis,” he said with deep gravity.

He further shared that I had a few choices. I could wallow in my insecurity and feelings of hopelessness, or I could use this as an opportunity to propel my life forward.

Even then I felt the ancient truth in this wisdom, echoed through the ages through sages like Marcus Aurelius, who said “The mind adapts and converts to its own purposes the obstacle to our acting. The impediment to action advances action. What stands in the way becomes the way.”

Now, I am fortunate to serve the global Pollination Project community; a devoted group full of changemakers for whom seemingly intractable obstacles became the catalysts for action.

I think of Poli Sotomayor, this week’s changemaker of the week, for whom the suffering of non-human animals tugged at her heart so strongly that it became a lifelong path, leading her to give up everything she knew to devote her life to helping others broaden their circle of concern.

I think of George Reginald Freeman, persecuted for his sexuality and driven from his home country to a foreign land, where he began work to make sure other refugees were supported in a way he was not.

I think of the nearly 400+ changemakers we were able to support last year through COVID-relief funding, for whom even a global pandemic was an opportunity to grow in community and service.

There are powerful individuals from all walks of life, in all corners of the world who are victimized but don’t allow themselves to be victims, who are overpowered, yet do not yield their power to anyone, who fight the hate they experience with love.

The world is full of waste — wasted time, wasted resources, wasted life.

Next time you face a crisis, make sure you don’t waste it.