On Observer Consciousness, Responsibility, and the Freedom to Meet Life as It Is

A friend recently told me about a podcast on cultivating observer consciousness. What I expected was curiosity, maybe scepticism. What I didn’t expect was how strongly they recoiled from it.

What they heard was an implicit judgment: that people need to change, that mental health should look a certain way, that “doing it right” meant becoming someone else. They told me that when something’s wrong, they hire someone to fix it. When it’s fixed, they go back to being themselves. And they’re genuinely content with who they are, thank you very much.

What struck me wasn’t the disagreement itself - it was where it landed. We weren’t talking about techniques. We were talking about responsibility, agency, and what it actually means to live well.

Stepping inside experience

My friend heard observer consciousness as emotional detachment - rising above being human. An implicit judgment about falling short. But observer consciousness isn’t about stepping outside of life. It’s about stepping inside experience without being swallowed by it.

I remember a time when my own experience of life felt like being buffeted around by my inner weather - emotions surging, thoughts looping, belief systems quietly dictating from the shadows what everything meant. I was constantly at the mercy of external circumstances because my attention was fixed on the gap between what was and what my thoughts and emotions insisted should be. That gap is an endless source of suffering, whether we realise it or not.

When we operate from that place, reality is never quite acceptable. Something is always wrong, missing, late, unfair. And because the world refuses to conform to our inner commentary, we experience ourselves at the mercy of life rather than participants in it.

Learning to connect with pure awareness changes this - not by removing emotion or thought, but by loosening their grip. From this place, many people recognise what athletes and artists call flow: attention becomes exquisitely attuned to the moment as it is, and action arises directly from that attunement rather than from reaction, judgment, or resistance.

We are no longer bracing against experience or trying to correct it in real time. We are responding from contact with what is actually happening. There is a genuine peace available here, not because life is calm, but because we are no longer at war with our own experience.

Consider how we relate to the weather. It rains, and we complain. The rain itself is neither good nor bad. It isn’t happening to us. And yet the very act of moaning reveals an underlying belief that we are somehow victims of the rain - that it has inconvenienced us, ruined something, disrupted a plan that was supposed to unfold differently.

If we pause for even a second, feeling victimised by the rain is quite absurd. The rain will continue whether we approve of it or not. But when we drop the story that it shouldn’t be happening, something shifts. The same rain can suddenly feel neutral, refreshing, even beautiful. Nothing external has changed - only our relationship to what is.

Observer consciousness gives us that choice. It restores our capacity to meet life directly, without distortion, and to notice how much of our suffering was never caused by circumstances themselves, but by the beliefs t0 which we unconsciously handed authority.

When mental health becomes something we outsource

This is where the conversation with my friend became most interesting.

Most of us have been taught to treat both physical and mental health as something that can be handed over to an expert. Something breaks. We find the right professional. They fix it. We return to “normal.” Of course, there is real value in support, therapy, medication, and care - but when we outsource responsibility for our inner life entirely, we lose something essential: the capacity to meet our own experience directly and respond to it in our own unique creative way.

Presence cannot be delegated.

No one can feel your body for you.

No one can notice your inner contraction for you.

No one can be aware on your behalf.

Observer consciousness isn’t a treatment for when something goes wrong. It’s a way of relating to experience that we cultivate over time - when things are hard and when they’re fine. It’s the difference between episodic repair and ongoing relationship.

And importantly, this isn’t about blame. Responsibility here doesn’t mean “it’s your fault.” It means: this is your territory. When we give that territory away entirely, we quietly reinforce a victim narrative - not because life isn’t difficult, but because we’ve positioned ourselves as fundamentally passive in our own experience.

Freedom without bypassing

There’s a fear that presence flattens people. That if we’re no longer identified with our emotions and thoughts, we’ll all end up the same - calm, neutral, vaguely enlightened.

The opposite is true.

I learned this in the final months of my last long-term relationship. My partner’s behaviour was deteriorating by the day - becoming abusive. My mind generated the narratives you’d expect: he’s being unfair, he’s out of control, I’m trapped, this is impossible.

Those stories weren’t wrong, exactly. But they weren’t useful. They kept my attention in a loop of reaction and justification that left me feeling powerless - rehearsing what I should say, what he should do, how this shouldn’t be happening.

What changed wasn’t the situation. It was where I put my attention.

Instead of following the mental commentary, I started bringing my awareness to what was happening in my body. And my body was giving me very clear information: tightness in my chest, a particular quality of alertness, the unmistakable signal that my boundaries were being breached and I wasn’t safe.

There was a real peace in connecting with that information - not because it was comfortable (it wasn’t), but because it was unarguable. My body wasn’t telling me a story about fairness or blame. It was telling me the truth about my lived experience in that moment.

From that place, I could act. Not from collapse or panic or the historical pattern of trying to manage his behaviour to keep myself safe. From clarity. I could take the steps I needed to protect myself, because I was no longer stuck in the narrative about how things should be different. I was present to what actually was.

Observer consciousness didn’t make me detached. It made me capable. It gave me access to information I couldn’t hear while I was caught in the story, and it freed me to respond from agency rather than reaction.

When we’re no longer hijacked by our inner weather, we don’t just experience life differently - we show up differently in relationship, in leadership, and in the way we listen and respond to others. Emotion still arises. Thoughts still appear. But they’re no longer dictating from the shadows.

This matters, because it changes what becomes possible.

If there is one capacity worth cultivating in an uncertain world, it’s presence - not control, not certainty, not even optimism.

Presence doesn’t make life easier, but it lets us meet life more directly.

And perhaps most importantly, it interrupts the habit of handing our inner authority away - to circumstances, to systems, to experts, to stories about how things are supposed to be. From that interruption comes a quiet but profound freedom: the freedom to participate fully in our own lives, exactly as they are, rain and all.