What is Consciousness Mentoring?
If you’ve spent any time here at The Gleam you may know that I’m an Ayurvedic Practitioner and Consciousness Mentor that helps women do the inner work needed to improve fertility naturally.
Consciousness Mentoring is a systematic method for accelerating inner growth and development. It is based on the ancient wisdom of Ayurveda. A very astute friend recently pointed out to me that when she started looking into Ayurveda she had difficulty understanding what it is. I remember feeling the same way at one point. I will write a whole post on Ayurveda in the near future, but today I want to focus on consciousness mentoring.
To be honest I don’t love calling what I do consciousness mentoring. It seems kind of vague and distant. Some might call it Spiritual Coaching, but I don’t resonate with the idea of being a coach. The work I do isn’t about pushing you to achieve or win something. It feels like there is an inherent pressure baked into the identity of a coach, and in the coaching relationship. What I really am is a guide.
I’m here to give you a tour around the parts of yourself that you may not have much familiarity with. You don’t hire a coach to give you a tour around a rainforest or Milan, you hire a guide, someone who can point out the things you might otherwise miss. The benefit of a guide is that you get a fuller, more vibrant, more beautiful experience. You learn information that might take a lifetime to pick up if you were left to figure it out for yourself.
This is where mentoring comes in. A mentor is someone who has been where you are going, knows what you might encounter, and can help you through the process. Someone who has a box of tools especially picked out for the terrain you will be encountering. The terrain in this case is consciousness.
So you can call me a Consciousness Mentor or Guide. Either one will do.
What is Consciousness?
The word “conscious” gets thrown around a lot these days. It gets added as a prefix to many different experiences of life to mean that you do it with greater awareness than you might otherwise. And I agree with the definition that consciousness is synonymous with awareness. However, I don’t always agree with what gets labeled as “conscious”, the same way I don’t always agree with what gets labeled “natural” in the grocery store.
Consciousness is the very field that we are living in, the water that we swim in, the air that we breathe. I remember being in some of my first yoga classes and being led into states of being where I could feel the intricate tapestry of love that is constantly weaving through us. It was a revelation to realize that it had always been there, would always be there, and that I only needed to tune into it to feel it.
Just writing that sentence makes me take a deep breath, adjust the aperture of my heart, and allow that truth to become more palpable in this very moment. Ahh.
It is easy for us to feel like separate individuals. Separate from each other, and separate from the world around us. Somehow we have found ourselves in a system that compartmentalizes everything. We go to different specialists to treat different parts of our body, we set boundaries between work and life, we show one version of our lives on social media while something much more complex is going on daily.
One common way of explaining consciousness is that it is the ocean, and all that we experience, every thought, feeling, image, and sensation is like a wave in that ocean. We are waves in that ocean, as is everyone and everything else.
My teacher would often use a drawing that looks like this:
The yellow dotted line indicates a level of consciousness. When consciousness is at this level we understand ourselves as individuals that need to gain everything we need. We feel separate from each other and from what we need to grow, heal, and prosper.
But can an individual wave ever be separated from the ocean?
No, of course not. The wave may think it is a separate thing, but it arises, lives, and falls in the ocean. We are all waves of consciousness that can never be separate from the ocean of consciousness that contains all that is. Thus we are already everything we think we need to gain.
When consciousness expands we understand ourselves to be something more than our current form.
Consciousness mentoring is a process for expanding consciousness so that we get to know the subtle and intangible aspects of ourselves that are a part of being human, but that we don’t have a framework for in our culture.
I moved to a yoga ashram and pursued studies in Ayurveda because I could feel that I was being blocked by invisible obstacles; traumas, beliefs, and emotions that felt so real but I couldn’t put my finger on and pluck out. I went to many therapists over the years but talk therapy never felt useful at all. It was only techniques that helped me move into different states of being that felt productive. I could never think my way out of my thoughts.
As I immersed myself in Ayurveda it was almost shocking to realize that it contained a framework for human life that I had never encountered before. I felt like, “how could this knowledge exist but so many of us don’t know about it?” It was like getting a roadmap of my inner terrain, the parts of me that I could feel were there, that affected everything I did, but that I did not have the tools or knowledge to work with.
Consciousness Mentoring has the tools and knowledge. It is a process of expanding consciousness, releasing subconscious complexes and programming, and integrating this new, more liberated and whole way of being into everyday life. It heals and clears the way for us to be what we are meant to be, this is why it is so potent for improving fertility.
Thank you for reading.
Here’s the music that came up when I was writing this. The Lost Mystique of Being in the Know by Rising Appalachia. I love everything they put out.
I’ll be giving a tour of our farm kitchen in my next post on Fertile Ground. Please subscribe so you don’t miss it. This is not your average kitchen reveal 😅
If you have a question but you don’t want to leave it in the public comments you can send it to me here.
Love,
Sri