One of the early aha moments I recall having while listening to my teacher Thom Knoles give a lecture, was a realisation that every problem I had ever encountered was a construction of my own consciousness state. 

Before learning to meditate, I was very quick to label something as a problem. Whether a deadline changed at work, my partner and I didn’t agree on a decision we needed to make or I came down with a cold - anything outside my expected range of experience was enough to trigger a stress response in my body and set off a negative cascade of thinking about the “problem”. 

This wasn’t because I was a negative person or someone who saw the world through a “glass half empty” lens. My tendency towards “problem consciousness” was due to an overriding predominance of stress chemistry in my body that clouded my perception and my ability to connect with my intuition. Though living in a state of perpetual fight or flight is an incredibly common experience, stress is not normal. Stress is an abnormality or imbalance caused by an overload of experience and the inability of the nervous system to recover from these overloads.

As daily Vedic meditators, with every meditation we let go of the impressions left by stress on the physiology and in doing so we expand our state of consciousness. Our state of consciousness is simply that which we can be aware of. Consciousness expands when we regularly give our mind the experience of settling down and stepping beyond thought; when the mind de-excites, the body rests deeply and unwinds the knots in our nervous system that getting stressed creates. Deep rest is the antidote to stress; Vedic meditation is a systematic way of resting the body deeply twice each day. As stress melts away and consciousness broadens, we discover that ideas, solutions and new ways of thinking about situations appear effortlessly in the mind without having to struggle or strain. 

Stress disconnects us from that feeling of knowing what is required of us in a given situation, our intuition. In the Vedic tradition we refer to intuition as the fine level of feeling; that subtle perceptual instrument inside that allows us to detect the need of the time from moment to moment. With heightened perceptual acuity, situations, people and circumstances no longer appear as problems. Problem consciousness is a natural and understandable consequence of being disconnected from our higher self by stress. Our higher self is that layer of us that exists beyond our thoughts. The more regularly we give the mind the experience of settling down and transcending thought, like we do when practicing Vedic meditation, we find our thoughts, speech and action spring forth from a place of deep inner wisdom that is unimpeded by stress. We discover that our consciousness knows no limitations.

Like with all the Vedic knowledge I share, my advice is always to hold this lightly. If you find yourself stuck in problem consciousness, be kind and gentle to yourself. Our journey home to our higher self is just that, a journey. The more we can relax into the process of evolving our state of consciousness, the less sticky the peaks and troughs will feel. One of the greatest challenges on my own journey has been to honour my own unique human experience without prosecuting myself for not being further along. With time I came to understand that my unrealistic expectations of myself came from a place of stress and conditioning, and all that was required was to continue on with my twice daily practice and correcting these mistakes of my intellect. As my teacher Thom says, the best thing to do always is to relax and enjoy.