Roaming through your life without compass is an option. We don’t know whether the trees, whales, and ants are intentional or instinctive about their movements. If you live in a constant state of emergency throughout your life, with your income, family, emotions, and well-being always challenged, you might be moving by instinct. There is nothing inherently wrong with that. However, if you want to live differently, you can.
Moving through your life with a firm hold on everyday in every way is an option, too. You might maintain a firm grip on all your activities and relations, decisively moving and manipulating circumstances to be a certain way or produce certain outcomes. This is a choice, too, that you may be making by intention, and there is nothing inherently wrong with that, either. If you want to live differently, you can.
There countless ways to understand how you are engaged in the world around you and within yourself. The Heartspace Scale provides a simple breakdown to help you understand what you’re doing. This is not a measurement of what’s “right” or “wrong”; instead, it can help us make a determination about where we’re at and where we can go.
Unconsciously Disengaged – The furthest away from using Heartspace with intention, 100% of all people unconsciously disengage from the world within and around themselves. The issues, people, places, actions, ideas, wisdom, and emotions surrounding them merely breeze by their ears. Again, there’s nothing “wrong” with this; its just the way it is.
Consciously Disengaged – None of us can authentically form and sustain lasting connections with everything around us all of the time. Most people have deliberately chosen not to engage in something at some point throughout their lives. Ads on buses, beggars on buses, kids with homework, friends with parties, all these things sometimes require us to let go and move on. Same with some ideas, some wisdom, some actions, and some feelings.
Unconsciously Engaged – When we don’t choose to connect but we do, and don’t form any sense of conscious awareness of that engagement, we are unconsciously engaged. We have a choice of whether to see these connections for what they are and what they do in our lives. When we don’t make those choices on purpose we are operating unconsciously.
Consciously Engaged – Decision-making can be the most obvious manifestation of consciousness. Every moment of every day we’re making decisions throughout our lives, and those decisions affect us in many ways. Consciously engaging is choosing to become lastingly connected. The world within us calls for this in equal measure to the world around us. However, the world around cannot fully benefit from our conscious engagement in it until we are consciously engaged in the world within us.
Knowing how we’re engaged is one of the first steps towards living in Heartspace.
Adam F.C. Fletcher 