Tag: consciousness

"Self consciousness is the indispensable means to enlightenment; at the same time it is the greatest obstacle in the way." ~Aldous Huxley

I live among teenagers, which brings me into intimate contact with the often crippling kind of self-consciousness that awakens in the human mind during adolescence.

The experience of being seen in these years swings between a primal desire and a punishing shame. Constantly conscious of what others think of what they look like, what they are doing or saying, we parents watch in dismay as our child’s once natural ability to be fully one’s self in the present moment erodes into habitual judgment of self and others.

Our heart is hands down our hardest working organ. It never sleeps, beating over two billion times in a lifetime and circulating 50 million gallons of blood. It is the first organ structure that comes to life in the embryo and holds us until our last breath.

It is hard to imagine how we could ever take this life-sustaining organ for granted, but so constant is the heart that we rarely stop to celebrate its function or recognize and listen to its needs.