How do you come alive? How do you rise above difficult circumstances or the boredom of a mundane life.

The short answer: You move away from apathy.

Apathy is a low vibration emotion. It does not serve you. It's opposite is creative dynamism.

There are several ways to move beyond this debilitating emotion:

1. Move your mind. Examine your thought process and release your inner pain that causes you to withdraw into apathy. You can do this through contemplation or journaling, or similar processes that force you to re-examine your way of thinking.

2. Move your emotions. Move through the stagnant emotion with a higher level emotion like frustration or anger, rising up the emotional scale until you can get to courage and proactivity.

3. Move your body. Exercise, get in touch with your more primal physical energy, and raise your endorphins.

If you look back on your life, you will see that those areas of your deepest failures were due to your inability to summon the energy to overcome your indifference. Jobs, relationships, and dreams collapsed because there was not enough energy to keep them alive, not enough energy to reverse adversity and adopt new strategies. In other words, apathy prevailed. When the opposite energy, interest, was high, you will see that you overcame insurmountable odds and brought into existence something that at one time seemed impossible.

Notice that when apathy prevailed, you failed and experienced a loss and when interest prevailed, you succeeded and expanded the quality of your life.

Apathy comes from the Greek word apatheia. The etymology of this word is "a" or "away from" and "pathos" or "emotions." Thus, it means a lack of feeling. It also means a lack of interest.

A person who is apathetic, then, is someone with low energy, who does not move toward creating anything useful, meaningful, or expansive. Impassiveness and indifference informs their experience.

In the days of the Roman Empire, apathy was extolled as a positive state. In Stoic philosophy, the condition of being totally free from "pathe," the emotions and passions, was seen as a very good thing because it meant relief from pain, fear, desire, and pleasure. It was a way of surviving the chaos, travail, and tragedy of life in those days.

However, one wonders, if a state of vegetative living, is truly a virtue.

The human soul, after all, comes to life when it is sparked by interest.

Interest awakens the brain to perceive, conceive, and achieve. Apathy is the antithesis of this state. It is a state of dullness and deadness. There is little value that can come from it.

Apathy is in fact an elaborate defense mechanism created by the subconscious mind to ward off pain. But since the energy of this emotion is not life-affirming, it is closer to the Freudian notion of thanatos, the death instinct, than eros, the life instinct. Someone who is apathetic is closer to the desire to be dead than the urge to be alive.
Apathy is a withdrawal from sensory experience. Like a tortoise, the psyche, withdraws into a shell of indifference.

Apathy can result in the death of individuals and cultures as a whole. When there is no interest in life, in the events of experience, in actively affirming values and creating meaning, things fall apart very quickly.

All human lives have pockets of apathy in them. These come and go, but when the inertia because overwhelming, then it can result in things necessary for well-being to fall apart.

Apathy is a reaction to trauma. It arises because some experience deadens your joy for life. Over time it creates the habit of withdrawal when things get out of control. As more and more "dead spots" fill a life, the life-force diminishes and a person not only fails to evolve but also drags down everybody around them.

Agitation, or reactivity, is not the answer to apathy, either. That is the other extreme, and equally dysfunctional and maladaptive. The answer to apathy is movement, re-inspiration of ideals, and a desire to serve all of life.

As you work on removing more and more pockets of apathy that you may fall into each day, you will find yourself coming alive with an enthusiasm for the things that interest you. The joy of life increases as your sense of apathy, an elaborate defense mechanism against noxious stimuli, decreases.

It does take will and effort to overcome habitual states of apathy, but what can be more rewarding than feeling more alive. Life, after all, despite its relentless challenges, is about rising in consciousness and feeling more alive as your awareness expands.