“Renewables” sounds like a fairly recent concept. However, we’ve been using renewable energy for millennia: wind, water, fire, and animal / human labor.

Today renewable energy is about saving the environment and diminishing our dependence on fossil fuels. Coupled with conserving finite resources, we’ve also gotten smart: smartphones, smart cars, smart homes, smart health care (wearables). Yet our smart solutions are dumbing us down in one crucial respect: we’re highly connected to them, and less connected to ourselves than ever before.

We are the ultimate renewable resource — when we become conscious of this truth. It’s a quantum shift in perception that changes everything.

What “Renewable” Really Means

Becoming a renewable resource doesn’t mean ditching your phone for the plow, but becoming more mindful in every moment. Think of it this way: work is applied energy. Sustaining your own energy means working with yourself as a renewable resource.

In their new book, The Healing Self, integrative medicine and personal growth pioneer Deepak Chopra, MD, and Harvard University brain health professor Rudolph E. Tanzi, PhD, discuss how well being is an inside job that starts with awareness.

They write: “Seeking self-renewal is a conscious decision, and it’s never once and for all. Renewal at the level of the cell is a constant and virtually automatic process, and so is self-renewal. The noted spiritual teacher Jiddhu Krishnamurti once made a provocative remark about meditation. People set aside a certain period of the day to meditate, he said, but they don’t realize that real meditation is twenty-four hours a day. The same is true for healing.”

In Western culture, we typically don’t slow down long enough to give our inner life a second thought — until life itself demands it. This often manifests as illness, because that’s what it takes to get us to press “pause”. 

How to Become A Renewable Resource

You don’t have to become a monk or jet off to India to sit at the feet of a sage when a health crisis hits, although these are viable personal growth paths. You do have to begin paying attention to what’s happening, ideally before the volume amplifies. This is how healing begins.

I speak from experience. In my early thirties, with a thriving remote business, piano lessons, and a 90 mph lifestyle, I ignored the symptoms proliferating in my body. Finally I hit the proverbial wall and, like a cartoon character, slid two dimensionally to the ground. The message was clear: “Time out! Get in touch with yourself at a deeper level if you want to get well.”

And I did. For the next three years, healing/wholing was my primary focus. As I began to heal physically, I simultaneously opened up spiritually. Whole/holy/heal all come from the same root word, “hale”. What I was undergoing transfigured me on a cellular level.

It was an initiation, as true healing always is.

Suffering Is Optional

Chopra and Tanzi write about the paradox of pain: how someone can be in intense physical pain yet not be “suffering”. In remembering who I am on a soul level, I began to experience a joy beyond anything I’d ever known. It was the most profound ah-ha! of my life. And while my body was still in pain, my expanding consciousness superseded it.

Of course, this unfolding made absolutely no sense to family and friends who were observing my process externally, shaking their heads.

It is only ever about you, yet far beyond the small “you” with whom you previously identified. When you step into your vastness, you become a renewable resource: embodying the light of wisdom, serving as a beacon for others on the awakening path.

Espavo defines this awareness succinctly: “Thank you for taking your power.” That’s the smart, renewable solution we all need now.

© Copyright June 2018 Amara Rose

About the author:

Amara Rose is a metaphysical “midwife” for our global rebirth. A former personal health columnist for Nation’s Business magazine, she’s written for Yoga Journal, E/The Environmental Magazine, MORE, Well.org, VentureBeat.com, and numerous other publications. Subscribe to Amara’s resource-rich monthly newsletter.