What is Conscious Living and How Can It Transform Your Life?

Conscious Living might be a new term for some, but living a conscious lifestyle has been practiced for many years. Conscious living is all about how you are living and appreciating everything around you. It begins with understanding yourself and your lifestyle, followed by a continuous path of self-development and clearing of mental or physical blockages you've endured over the years.

Conscious living is all about being mindful. Practicing mindfulness involves living with inner peace and how the world deeply connects with us. It brings us gratitude and happiness right here and right now.

The road to happiness requires gradual steps and each step should be in line with how you live consciously. The measurement of success is not only in financial terms. Your success can be measured by how successfully you connect and positively influence the people around you or it can be how healthy your mental and physical well-being are. Most importantly, success can also be measured by how content you are with your inner peace and happiness.

Living consciously is the way of becoming more aware of yourself, the awareness of knowing what your mind and body needs and living your life based on these needs. And here are some easy steps to start living consciously:

1. Find Yourself

Write down the goals you want most in your life. List all the things that make you happy and what doesn’t. These are the goals that only relate to you and does not necessarily need to involve the people around you. Define your strengths and weaknesses so that you can work out how these can help you achieve your goals. The more we know about ourselves the more we understand other people and how we can help them. This allows us to work on things such as patience, honesty, self-worth and so on.

2. Acceptance and Gratitude

It takes time to accept something especially when it comes to accepting who we are. If you learn to accept the truth of who you are, you will start making decisions based on what’s best for you instead of what you think society wants. This is a big step towards self-development and conscious living. The key here is all about self-gratitude.

Having gratitude is like having a powerful key to positivity, happiness and fulfilment. Being grateful sets a positive mindset to your daily routine allowing you to make the right and best decisions in your life. It all starts by just appreciating the smallest things that happens around you!

3. Start a Meditation, Breathwork or Yoga Routine

Meditation, Breathwork and Yoga practices are a great way to learn about who you are and where your thoughts come from. If practiced consistently on a daily basis, it is a way to finding inner peace, focus and mental clarity.

Meditation can be as simple as just sitting alone at the end of the night and just be present, breath and let whatever thoughts come and go for a few minutes. The key is to be patient and persistent in keeping calm.

For those with abit of experience with meditation, you may start incorporating breathwork into your practice. Breathwork can be as simple just consciously aware of your own breathing pattern through the nose (nasal breathing). Other simple methods you can start practicing includes controlled belly breathing, box breathing or coherent breathing.

Yoga practice is great for developing habits like discipline, mindfulness and self-awareness. There are many options in getting started with yoga, from online courses to local yoga studios. For more ideas in how to get started with yoga, check our previous blogpost: Getting started with Yoga - A Beginner's Guide

4. You are what you eat

Conscious eating is about being fully present while you are eating. As well as being present, the right nutrients and the quality of the food you intake will affect you on many levels, physically and mentally. By choosing right food to eat is the beginning of a healthier body while also optimising energy and focus levels.

While we always say "you are what you eat", we would like to also point out that “you are what you not eat”. By this, we mean there are many fasting rituals (most notably intermittent fasting) that can benefit the mind and the body in many ways. Don’t jump into any fasting routine without the right research, as each fasting technique suits different people with different health goals and body types.

5. Drink, drink, drink

We have pointed out previously that what you put into your body will ultimately decide how you feel. We are all familiar with drinking 6-8 waters a day. But remember to listen to your body, the amount of exercise and the level of stress in our bodies will affect how much water we need. The body is made up of 60% water and any health practitioner will tell you that hydration is the key to stamina and physical strength. Your mental performance is also highly determined by your hydration levels so that’s why we recommend you to drink, drink, drink.

Start your day by drinking 500ml of water first thing in the morning. There are many popular claims that drinking water first thing in the morning has many health benefits including rehydration after sleep, weight loss, improve mental focus, better metabolism and the removal of toxins.

6. Making Conscious Decisions

After a thorough self-analysis, it is time to set the intentions you want your life to be. You’ve determined your mindset and life values so now your decision-making should be based around these goals. How are you going to change yourself and the world for the better? These life choices will have an impact on your life, the lives of people around you and ultimately the planet.

Living consciously can be simple and satisfying. Each decision we make determines how we live consciously resulting a positive impact on our planet. Don’t stress yourself because of what other people are doing with their lives. Conscious living is what determines how you live your life and be conscious of everything around you. Waking up and living in the present moment can be a ripple effect in making the world a better place.

At Erthe Life, we dedicate ourselves in promoting conscious living through yoga, movement and breath. Remember to bookmark our page www.erthelife.com for inspirations, education and products on conscious living.