I had the idea for My Consciousness Project a couple of years ago, just after I read Gretchen Rubin’s book, The Happiness Project. I considered, at the time, starting my own happiness project, but realized pretty quickly that I was actually (luckily) a very happy person.

What I was beginning to question, however, was not so much my happiness quotient, but my spirituality quotient. Having gone through a couple of pretty scary health issues in the last few years, I started to really wonder why these things kept happening to me, and whether there was some sort of big life lesson that I just wasn’t learning.  Did the universe really work that way and, if so, was there something I should be doing that I clearly hadn’t figured out?

I started reading books on the whole mind, body, spirit connection which led me to try a few alternative healing methods. One thing I noticed through all of this was that when I would talk to certain people about what I was doing, a lot of them would roll their eyes saying, “Oh, you’re into that?”. Or worse, their eyes would just glaze over and they’d change the subject.

So the first idea for my project was to somehow share everything I was learning in a way that might get some of those ‘eye-rolling’ people more interested. But that’s as far as I got…for some reason I just never was able to put pen to paper to get it started. In hindsight I realize that was probably because the idea was more about changing other people than myself. Funny how the universe works.

So then I came across a quote from Daisaku Ikeda, a Buddhist philosopher, and I knew as soon as I read it that I had found the basis for my would-be project. Ikeda asserts that:

“A great inner revolution in just a single individual will help achieve a change in the destiny of an entire society and,  further, will cause a change in the destiny of humankind.”

Could it be possible that I, an ordinary, everyday person, could somehow change the destiny of humankind by sparking my own inner revolution? And could I spark that revolution by trying to raise my consciousness?

Well, it seemed that if ever there was a time to try, this was it, so I found a list on the internet of ‘100 Ways to Become More Conscious’ and My Consciousness Project was born. My plan is to go down the list, trying out each suggestion for a week at a time, and then write about my experience.

It is my fervent hope that Daisaku Ikeda is right and at the end of 100 weeks (give or take a few!) the world and I will be in a much better place than we are right now.