"Be grateful for what you have and stop complaining - it bores everybody else, does you no good, and doesn't solve any problems." - Zig Ziglar
Today I want to share another idea to help you live more consciously and that can also help you understand yourself better. The idea involves an experiment. All I want you to do is just for one whole day to not complain. Impossible, I know, but just try your best. It doesn't matter how big or small, try your best to not complain. Try to stop yourself from complaining as soon as you realize that you're complaining.
Maybe it's the weather that bugs you today. The weather is one of the things that people always talk about and it has a huge influence on their mood. If a rainy day is something that usually brings you down try your best to not complain. Perhaps it's the person at the grocery store who's ahead of you in line and they're really irritating you or you're driving and somebody cuts you off. No matter how big or small try your best to not complain about anything.
What this experiment is trying to show you is that complaining occupies a big part of our day. For many of that's all we do. That's one of the key insights that we need to get from this experiment. In order for you to see how much you complain it's gonna require you to observe yourself more objectively. Almost everybody believes that they already observe themselves, that they're always observing their behavior, but the reality is that most of us don't really observe ourselves objectively because we've never been taught how to properly use our attention to observe ourselves.
Knowing Thyself Through Self-observation
When I speak about self-observation and this is a theme and a topic that you will hear me repeat continuously. The reason is that these are key principles and key ideas to help us become more conscious, more aware. These are ideas that need to be repeated. The reality is that many of us are very unconscious, we live in a type of self-hypnosis with our minds, with our emotions. We need to constantly be exposed to these ideas.
I try to come at it from many angles until these ideas are able to penetrate our usual ways of thinking, our usual ways of being. It's my hope that after repeating many of these themes, many of these ideas, in different ways that they are assimilated into your way of being.
Only when it touches your mind, your heart, and your body is when you will really understand some of these ideas. When that happens this will become your own understanding, your own knowledge, which will then ripple out into your everyday life. Once it's your own understanding you'll be able to gain further insight and make more connections. As I mentioned what we're trying to do here is become aware how much we complain so that's going to require that you observe yourself through sincere honest self-observation.
To practice sincere self-observation, the first thing you need to do is locate yourself in time and space. What does that mean? That means that you simply become aware of your body. How we become aware of our body is just to bring awareness to the sensation of our body. There are many ways and methods to do this.
I think a helpful way for the sake of this experiment is to bring your awareness and attention to your solar plexus, to your abdominal area. Focus your attention on the sensations of your abdominal area. What we're trying to do here is just to ground our attention in our body. From this place, once you have your attention in your body, simply acknowledge that I'm here, in this place, in this time, in this moment.
This is just a simple acknowledgment of our existence in this moment. Once you've done that, then you can observe whatever is going on in your inner world, what you're thinking and what you're feeling. The reason and the importance of grounding yourself in your body is because we are trying to be objective to our observation. People think they observe themselves but most of us have become very head-oriented, we live our lives in our heads. What happens is you just observe from the intellectual level of the mind. Without grounding your attention in your body it would just be the mind observing the mind. When it's at that level it's too easy to deceive oneself and get lost in our imagination.
At that level it's like a house of mirrors. After a while your observation just becomes lost and you don't know what is true. By grounding your attention in your body it is like bringing your attention outside of the mind and then from that point looking back at the mind. You need to really practice daily, make it a way of life, because at the beginning stages you will only be able to maintain your attention on the sensation of your body for very short amounts of time.
This is something that we're not accustomed to, but this is how you become more conscious. To do this is requires conscious effort, the more you do it the better you will get at it. From this perspective you will able to observe the contents of your mind more objectively. The goal of this experiment was to see how much we complain. Observing in this way you will be able to be more objective. You will clearly see that as you go about your day you want to complain about everything. Our mind is basically a mechanism for labeling things under good or bad.
You will see how your mind automatically labels the events of your day as you encounter them. By grounding the attention in your body and keeping the sensation on your body you will be able to observe more objectively. If you are clearly seeing it, you don't need to be it. That's another key idea for you to try to assimilate. If you can see it, you don't need to be it. Which means I do not need to go along with this labeling process and become identified to my labels.
As soon as you become identified you don't question the labeling process. It will be a force of habit that will choose for you. There's no freedom in that. That's one of the key insights that you need to get. You need to see how you label everything automatically into black and white.
Complaining occupies such a big part of our life. This will bring up a current within your inner space for you to observe. You will be able to bring more consciousness and more awareness your unconscious tendencies. It's going to become a conscious struggle.
This is how you can use the world to become more conscious and more aware. All your daily situations can be used. Everything that you encounter in life can be used as a reminder and as material to become more self-aware and more conscious. This is an amazing experiment that can really change your life. It can give you deep insight into who you really are, how you really are, and how you behave.
Being Less Mechanical and Becoming More Conscious
By observing a lot of these habits and seeing them thousands of times play out and by infusing them with more awareness you will slowly start extracting your sense of identity from all these habits. You will be less asleep, you'll be in more of a position to change your behavior.
You can then observe a situation in which you realize that you're acting in a new way that is not dictated through habit. This is what it means to be reborn, to be a new man. Now you're acting from a place of awareness, from a place of consciousness, and you're slowly breaking away from your habitual tendencies.
If done sincerely you'll gain invaluable self-knowledge, knowledge that will help you grow in your Beingness. Take these ideas and apply them and see for yourself and through your own experience verify. These ideas are very transformative if you approach them with the right perspective and right understanding. Not everybody is ready for these type of ideas.
Another thing from this experiment that I want to show you, as far as with complaining, is you'll start making a shift more to your internal world. You will realize that complaining, for the most part, doesn't do anything to solve our problems, It usually just serves to exacerbate them. You'll go from the things you can't control, which is the external world, to your internal world. From the world of matter to the world of formlessness, of consciousness. When you can sense that you're making that transition it's a monumental moment in your life.
I made a YouTube video, describing how to use your attention to properly practice self-observation. You can check it out here: https://youtu.be/f9H1p6IW3gs