Running from Consciousness
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Much of modern life is quietly organized around avoiding consciousness — Routine, distraction, and compulsive doing can all become subtle ways of not being present with the life we are actually living.
Boredom is not the problem you have been told it is — It is often the doorway to creativity, insight, and honest contact with yourself. That, of course, is contingent upon how willing we are to stay with it long enough to observe what opens up to us.
Consciousness is the doorway to a life lived intentionally — The present moment, met honestly, is where meaning, purpose, and the freedom to choose actually live.
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Click here to listen to the discussion from Harvard Business Review on Boredom, featuring Dr. Arthur Brooks
What are we actually evading?
Often, my clients inspire the topics that are discussed in this newsletter and a recent moment in session really stuck with me wherein which they described the felt sense of, “Running from consciousness.”
Maybe you felt a shift within you reading that, the same as I felt hearing it. This note feels like one of the most honest descriptions of a very human experience. Most of us, in small or large ways, quietly move our attention away from the present moment. This is not always because we don’t care about our lives, but because being fully present often asks something of you (i.e. notice what you have been feeling, sit with what is unresolved, observe what your current choices are creating). In the face of these invitations, we might reach for something else — truly anything that will allow us to keep moving so stillness does not show up (e.g avoiding momentarily anxiousness or tension by scrolling for an hour on instagram).
Ok, so here’s the conundrum. It feels momentarily comfortable to avoid being with our lives, while consciousness itself is the very ground on which an intentional life is built. Today, we are going to take a look at the ways we all pull attention away from our lives and explore what other choices are accessible to us to truly be with our lived experience.
When we turn away
Let’s explore what occurs when we actively or inadvertently look away from our lives.
In Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (🔗) there is a concept referred to as experiential avoidance. This describes the pattern of steering away from unwanted internal experiences, thoughts, feelings, memories, or bodily sensations — even at the cost of living in accordance with our own values. While this provides short term relief, it also tends to intensify the very discomfort it is trying to escape and truly diminishes our capacity to live in ways that feel meaningful.
On a related note, for many of us interested in creating greater mindful engagement with life, the Default Mode Network (📹) is probably something that has been stumbled across. This neural network becomes active when the mind is not focused on a specific task and is associated with mind wandering, self referential thinking, memory consolidation, imagination, and insight. Contemporary psychological research notes that unstructured mental time* (*keep this in mind, we will come back to this idea later today) is essential for creativity, self understanding, and the emergence of new ideas.
When we fill each moment with input, we might be depriving the brain of the conditions required to generate the insights that would allow our lives to move forward.
You may have subtly noticed experiential avoidance in your life as:
a reflexive reach for your phone the moment stillness arrives
a pattern of filling silence with music, podcasts, or audiobooks (Note: stimuli isn’t the problem, it’s the habitual pattern of using it to avoid something. If you are unaware of the delineation between these two, this is your opportunity to pause and reflect in stillness)
an inability to sit through a meal or walk without some form of secondary input
Unstructured Mental Time
Ok, we are back as I stated earlier to the concept of unstructured mental time. When I wrote that I’m sure at least one person reading this thought — “That sounds incredibly boring.” That one person is incredibly correct.
Most of us have been taught, implicitly or explicitly, that boredom is a negative state to be escaped. In our contemporary culture that has engineered constant availability of every kind of dopamine releasing content, it makes sense that boredom is something that we tolerate the least.
Current research on boredom suggests that when it is met rather than fled, functions very differently than we have been led to believe. Increased periods of boredom are associated with increased creativity and problem solving. Essentially, boredom is not evidence that we need more input, it is often the awareness that would allow us to identify what our lives are actually asking of us. It is an incredibly direct pathway to insight.
When we are bored our mind’s move differently and this is not a mystical claim. Thoughts that we haven’t made room for begin to surface, feelings that have been running in the background become available, and ideas we had not been able to reach begin to arrive. This is a well documented feature of the mind when our attention is not fragmented with constant input.
Off The Page: Actioning The Insights
Meeting your life with presence
Your practice this week
This week the practice is to bring more conscious attention to your relationship with your own life, and to allow small moments of presence to interrupt the patterns of avoidance that have become normalized. Take a look at the reflection questions and strategies below and notate what resonates with you.
Reflection Questions:
When was the last time you were fully with something without secondary input?
What tends to be the first thing you reach for when stillness arrives?
What do you believe would show up if you allowed boredom to exist, even for just a few minutes?
Strategies:
Do one thing
Choose one ordinary task this week and do it with your full attention, without any additional stimulation (e.g. shower, cook a meal, go for a walk, enjoy your morning coffee, drive to work). This is often more difficult than it sounds, and more revealing than we expect.
Allow boredom to exist
If boredom arises this week, attempt to resist the immediate reach for input. Can you last two minutes? Maybe 5? Simply notice what happens and recognize what boredom can become if just allowed to exist.
Get curious
Set aside a few minutes this week to ask, “What might I be avoiding meeting inside myself?” (Note: This is not a demand for immediate answers. If you have been habitually fragmenting your attention, be gracious with yourself and recognize that this is a challenging question to ask directly and your answers will arrive in their own time, especially if it is your first time posing this question)
Human life is ephemeral, do you want to live it fully? Consciousness is the doorway to your life, waiting for you to enter.
Thank You
Thank you for joining me this week! I’m excited to keep sharing insights from my work, research, and personal journey with you.
Did something resonate with you? Curious about applying these strategies in your life? Or know someone who might benefit?
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A Listen for the Week
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