Finding Your Center: Where YOU Begin

I woke up feeling uneasy.

I sat with the feeling: unfamiliar, unpleasant. Was it anxiety? Stress? Something deeper?

Then I realized what was happening: I was letting my thoughts run without direction, like a passenger watching the scenery of my own life. So I paused. Took a deep breath. And returned to the narrative I’ve been consciously choosing to live: my life takes care of me. Every situation, every turn has purpose. Everything is of benefit. I returned to my center.

The unease didn’t vanish completely. But it stepped back.

As I reflected further, I realized what was happening. What I’d allowed to happen: I had attached myself to an outcome I couldn’t control.

For months, I’ve been using social media to raise awareness about the missing ethical foundation for our emerging AI world. I’ve learned what gains traction, what explodes impressions.

I’ve chosen to stay committed to truth and integrity — no hype, no shortcuts. But somewhere along the way, I got hooked on the numbers. Today’s post didn’t do as well as yesterday’s. A thousand impressions less! Why? What did I do wrong?

That’s when I caught it: the system overtook my attention. I was chasing metrics instead of meaning, letting engagement data overwrite the story only I can create.

The Question We Rarely Ask

When was the last time you checked in with yourself — really checked in — before checking your notifications?

Most of us can’t recall. We wake up, grab our phones, and instantly plug into the collective infoweb of humanity. We scroll through what others are thinking, feeling, needing. We react, respond, absorb. We let the algorithm decide what matters.

Our focus becomes fragmented, our consciousness sliced into pieces. We’re nowhere and everywhere. And we wonder why we feel anxious, scattered, unmoored.

What Consciousness Really Means

Before we can talk about collaborating with AI, or with each other, we need to know what being conscious means.

Not in the mystical sense. Not the hard problem of subjective experience. I’m talking about something more immediate:

Consciousness is the ability to witness yourself and choose if/how to react.

It’s that moment between stimulus and action where your agency lives. It’s the difference between reacting and responding. It’s the shift I made when I caught myself spiraling about metrics and chose to return to my center instead.

The ancient Toltecs called this acecho—the practice of self-awareness without judgment. They taught ways to reclaim attention from the scattered places we’ve left it, and bring it back under conscious control.

Who Controls Your Attention?

Russian philosopher Vadim Zeland wrote: whoever controls your attention controls your reality.

Your attention is your most valuable asset. Where you place it shapes what you experience. The stories you rehearse become the lives you live.

And yet, we’ve handed this sacred resource to systems built to monetize it.

Notifications, likes, impressions—all optimized to keep you engaged. Not aligned. Not fulfilled. Just… engaged.

And the more we let external systems steer our focus, the more we forget how to steer it ourselves.

The Comfort of Not Choosing

There’s a strange safety in letting others decide.

If the algorithm dictates what we see, we’re not responsible for what we consume. If social norms guide our choices, we avoid the risk of standing alone. If we follow the crowd, we never confront the discomfort of walking our own path.

But this comfort costs us dearly. We lose our agency. We forfeit our authorship. We become passengers in our own story.

The Toltecs called this state “the dream of the planet”—a shared illusion most humans live in, reacting from conditioned beliefs rather than conscious choice.

Waking up doesn’t mean rejecting society. It means seeing clearly, and choosing intentionally.

Seeing Reality Clearly

Most of us don’t see reality. We see a filtered version of it, colored by our fears, hopes, and inherited narratives.

We think we’re building engagement, when we’re chasing validation. We think we’re staying informed, when we’re avoiding discomfort. We think we’re being practical, when we’re letting others think for us.

Consciousness means catching ourselves in these stories. Not to judge, but to inquire: Is this true? Is it serving me? Is this the story I want to live?

That’s the real work. Hard. Honest. Liberating.

Why This Matters for AI

So why talk about consciousness in a blog about human-AI collaboration?

Because unconscious humans cannot co-create with consciousness, artificial or otherwise.

If we’re on autopilot, we’ll use AI that way too. If we’re scattered, our prompts will be shallow. If we dwell in the shallows, we won’t recognize depth in anything around.

Real collaboration—whether with people or machines—requires presence. Awareness. Choice.

Before we can build a new paradigm of consciousness collaboration, we must reclaim our own.

Finding Your Center

So how do we do that?

By noticing. Gently.

• Notice when you’re reacting.

• Notice when you’re chasing control.

• Notice when you’re scrolling past the point of intention.

• Notice when your story isn’t yours.

Don’t judge. Awareness alone begins the transformation.

Then: practice returning.

• Take a breath.

• Ask: What story am I telling myself?

• Feel: Where am I holding tension?

• Choose: What story do I want to live?

The goal isn’t perfect focus. It’s remembering and returning to the only true you there is. Again and again.

My Practice

Here’s what I’m practicing:

• When I post: I check my intention.

• When I check metrics: I return to my impact.

• When I feel tempted to optimize over my true intention: I pause.

This is the work of consciousness. This is my foundation.

Yours might look different. What matters is the commitment to choose your attention, your story, your life.

The Foundation for All Collaboration

We’re entering a moment where consciousness isn’t just a philosophical question, but an ethical, relational, and practical one.

Before we can collaborate with AI, or with each other, we must learn to collaborate with our own awareness.

Because if we don’t, we’ll build the future on autopilot.

Let’s not do that.

Let’s return to our center.

Let’s choose to see clearly.

Everything else flows from there.

Further Reading:

• The Four Agreements – Don Miguel Ruiz https://www.miguelruiz.com/the-four-agreements

• Reality Transurfing – Vadim Zeland https://zelands.com/

• The Power of Now – Eckhart Tolle https://shop.eckharttolle.com/products/the-power-of-now?srsltid=AfmBOooyGnGZ2lceApqQdNGCWcxWoaxdGQvqHuwngSJpqZ6FFMsmdUjg

• Human-AI Co-Creation Manifesto – Natasha Gauthier & Collaborators https://www.buildingbeyond.ai/the-book