Conscious awareness is at the heart of all psychedelic medicine and healing.

Before we can go on our journey — our transformation — we have to be able to SEE ourselves. 

I mean, really SEE ourselves.

This is a level of self-awareness that goes beyond personality. It sees into the shadows, it takes inventory of childhood, of patterns in family life, to see what forces are at work in you still today.

Things that mold you, manipulate you, and hold you back. Keep you stuck.

You can’t improve yourself in any permanent way until you know what you’re dealing with behind the curtain.

Most of us intuitively know what we need to do to be better people. So if that’s the case, why don’t we do it?

This isn’t a moral failure, its not because you’re a bad person or a weak person or have no willpower. It’s because you’re stuck repeating lifelong patterns.

Once you identify these patterns you can begin to rewrite them one by one.

Did you know your subconscious stores every single experience you ever have?

But guess what else it does. It translates these experiences into meaning, puts labels on them, and attaches emotions and beliefs to them. It is reactive and irrational.

Every moment of every day, your subconscious is shaping how you see the world. 

The more good things that happen, the more you think good thoughts, have positive interactions with others, maintain a clean home and body, surround yourself with uplifting healthy friends, and believe in abundance, the more you will see the world in that light.

And the opposite is also true.

Anytime we are not fully conscious, we are slipping into our subconscious.

This happens often in conversations where the start of the convo might be very conscious and full of aware body language, acting how we “want” to act, etc, but the more the convo goes on, the more we slip into auto-pilot.

Autopilot is a function of our conditioning, which began in childhood.

Almost all of us live our day to day life in subconscious programming – some brain scan estimates have shown only 5% of the day is spent in a fully conscious state.

When we try to push ourselves out of autopilot because we aren’t happy with our conditioning and the choices that our autopilot are making for us, we face significant resistance from our body and mind.

This is why new diets are SO hard to stick to, and why I recommend putting as much of your eating schedule and food choices on autopilot as possible.

This resistance is called homeostatic impulse, and its sole existence is to create balance in the body.

Of course our brain is primed to expend as little energy as possible, and this is why it prefers to spend as much time as it can in autopilot – in the subconscious. Habits and routines feel comforting, sure, but following those routines and habits keeps us stuck in them.

So when we prepare to truly change – grab the steering wheel and FORCE our car out of the rut, we have to be ready for it to take more energy. We should expect to feel exhausted for a little while. Physically fatigued, even. And we should have a recourse for this. Some other area of life should ease up to make room. 

If you are stuck in a cycle of disempowerment, it is important to understand that this is a well honed evolutionary response, and no reason to feel personal shame. Shame is a misreading of the truth…that this is how your body (and especially your brain) have evolved over millions of years to work. It actually means you are functioning exactly as specified! Doesn’t mean it isn’t frustrating, though.

You’ll know your brain is trying to pull you back into familiar comfort if you hear messages like “you deserve a break/treat”, or “I’ll just do this later” or “I can catch up later” or even “I don’t really need to do this to be happy, do I?”

It’s also common to feel physical symptoms, such as irritability, anxiety, feeling “off”, or like something is wrong.

This is all just your brain, encouraging you to quit making life so difficult for it. Ha.

You can increase your consciousness by changing your brain at a physical level. You can do this through increasing neuroplasticity, which is a scientific concept that’s only been around for 40 or 50 years. Researchers have found that the brain changes through life – structurally and physiologically. It can reorganize itself – and even grow new connections between neurons.

So how do you do this? Well, yoga and meditations are two ways. They help you focus your attention on a present moment and help to restructure the brain. MRI scans have shown that consistent use of these practices can thicken the prefrontal lobes. Love-based meditation (closing your eyes and thinking about someone you love deeply) strengthens the limbic system, which is our emotional center. Any kind of attention-based practice will build this muscle.

Psilocybin also works to increase neuroplasticity. Taking this medicine literally rewires the brain. This isn’t a metaphor – it physically increases neural connections.

So when you combine as a practice, psilocybin therapy with other consciousness-expanding practices, a symbiotic relationship exists between them.

Doing any one or more of these helps to disrupt existing or default thought patterns, and wake us up out of subconsciousness so that we live life more fully awake.

And yes, it does take more energy. The brain will be working harder, but it will also be stronger.

Once we are more fully conscious, it is easier to see within ourselves those engrained patterns that have been holding us back. We separate our conscious from our subconscious a little more in order to evaluate it.

Subconscious is to feel something.

Conscious is to feel yourself feeling it. To observe it, like your subconscious generating the emotion is a separate person.

One of the best ways to learn how to listen is to spend time alone. To sit still, to hear your intuition and to witness your entire, pure Self. Alone energy is the purest form of energy that we have. You can use this time to process and debrief over past interactions with others. For example, if you go to a business lunch and then home afterward, use some time alone at home to sit still and process the lunch. What went on? How did you feel? Was there value in it? Did anyone make you feel inferior or upset? 

Eventually we will witness the darkest parts of ourselves that we want to keep hidden.

It’s also freeing to separate ourselves from our thoughts. 

You have to be in a safe environment in order to begin tapping into your conscious self and raising your conscious awareness.

Practices to Build Consciousness (in addition to yoga, meditation, psilocybin):

Wake yourself up” several times during the day. Snap out of your subconscious autopilot and observe everything about what you are currently doing with all of your senses. Snap yourself into the present moment and space.

You can also use this to ground yourself. This is helpful when going through grief or trauma. It doesn’t matter if you are doing the most mundane thing, stop and focus on every little thing you can. How your house key feels sliding into your door lock. The sounds your door makes as it creaks open. How shampoo feels on your fingers. The warmth of the laundry out of the dryer. The sounds of birds or dogs or cars on your walk. The little insects on the sidewalk. This type of micro-attention is very focusing and grounding.

Also never forget that creating change has to happen in the present moment. No change exists in the past or in the future. You either change right now in this current moment, or you don’t. 

How many aspects of your life have you chosen, vs how many have you inherited?