We are often told to listen to our conscience, but if you are anything like me, you might think that your conscience does not speak to you. I am no expert I have just done a lot of thinking and some research on this subject. In this article, we will be talking about the ways in which your conscience “speaks” to you, why you need to listen to your conscience, and different ideas about what your conscience could be.
Our conscience speaks to us through our “gut” feelings.
We get these feelings quite often, for example, when we meet someone new, we might think, “Hmmm, I don’t know why, but I really don’t trust this person.” That is your conscience speaking to you.
We might expect to hear words and direct guidance, but this is not how it works. These gut feelings are meant to guide you. Your conscience will create these feelings while your mind puts them into words.
Your conscience is always guiding you through life, but we often ignore it because what your conscience wants you to do is often what is hardest for you. We know what we really want in life, but it is still hard to strive for because of resistance that comes in the form of laziness, procrastination, and talking ourselves out of what we know we must do.
Life becomes simple when you only listen to your conscience. In each moment your conscience will guide you on what you should do. There is no need to overanalyze or overthink. Just take each moment as it comes and listen to your conscience.
Conscience congruent living is following and listening to the feelings that your conscience produces and nothing else.
This is the simplest (but not easy) way to go through life. All you have to do is listen to your conscience at all times and you would never go wrong. You would get whatever you really wanted out of life. Your life would be in a consistent state of flow, and you would be walking the path of life that was meant for you.
But this is not often the case. We want to lose weight, but then we eat fast food instead of something healthy. We want to have more money, but then we go and buy things we don’t need. This is cognitive dissonance; you do the opposite of what you really want and what your conscience is telling you to do.
Cognitive dissonance is what causes anxiety, depression, and regret later in life.
When we spend our lives doing the opposite of what we really want, we will constantly be looking toward the future in fear, or anxiety. This fear of the future is caused by being out of alignment with our conscience in the present moment, and our mind is showing us the future we will have if we keep up with these out of alignment actions. We will get depressed because we are in a constant state of hurting ourselves by doing the opposite of what we really want. We will feel all of the symptoms and not know why. When it’s because deep down inside we know that we should be doing what we really want but we aren’t. The regret comes later in life. We will grow old and look back at our lives and realize we didn’t accomplish what we really wanted because all we did was sabotage ourselves through this cognitive dissonance.
When you rid yourself of everything that causes regret in your life and you listen to the call of your conscience, you walk your path.
When you do begin listening to your conscience and ridding yourself of what you regret, your path becomes very narrow. Not narrow in the sense that you will fall off if you slip up but narrow in the sense that you know exactly what you must do without many variables. Regret is your conscience telling you what not to do, so if you get rid of everything that your conscience tells you not to do, and start implementing everything it tells you to do, you will know exactly what must be done.
Try to pinpoint exactly where these feelings come from, and your mind will try to convince you that it produced them. Your mind formulates what your conscience produces. For example, our conscience will make us feel like we need to lose weight, eat less, or eat healthier, but our minds will put them into words so we can better understand them.
Our conscience can be labeled as a few different things: it can be the voice of creation, God, our guardian angel, or all of these things which could in turn truly only be one thing with different labels. Regardless, I believe that these entities are speaking to us to help guide us on our path through life that we are supposed to live. We are simply an instrument of this higher power, and the way it guides us is through our conscience. Our conscience never lies to us, and it would never lead us astray. Our conscience is something more powerful than we are and we must follow it. Some cultures believe that your conscience is God speaking to you. I agree with this idea, these feelings that our conscience produces, do not stem from our minds, they come from something much greater than us.
Listen to your conscience and nothing else, eliminate what you regret from your life, and walk the path your conscience provides for you. We get so confused about what we should do with our lives, but the answer is inside us and is revealed to us moment by moment. Stay present, stay aware, and walk your path.
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