Self-Awareness – The Game Changer

This is the 6th of 7 Articles in the Series “A Process of Change”

Our ability to reflect on ourselves, on the experience we are having is what makes us human beings. “Being”, being the operative word. As I Stated in depth in my article about States of Being, we are constantly in some State of Being, the State of Being that is awareness in my opinion, is the most powerful State of Being. Our ability to shift what we are aware of, in any given moment has profound implications.

We can be in utter joy in any given moment, then step back in our awareness and be in awe of that moment of joy, we may deepen or broaden any State by shifting our perspective through awareness. Like the most delicious cake, each experience has many different layers to it, accessible through awareness. We are able to revisit and relive any moment of deep pleasure, or of deep agony and refine or redefine the meaning we take from it.

Awareness empowers us to step back from all our experiences, our feelings, emotions, thoughts and beliefs, while enabling us to reflect on what we see, hear, smell, taste and touch. Our awareness steps back and take in all of us, the whole of us. At the same it is the tool which allows us to experience ourselves at whatever level or perspective of our choosing. Naturally this ability to choose what level we experience takes practice. Awareness is nothing in and of itself, yet it allows us to connect to any aspect of ourselves faster than the blink of an eye.

We grow and evolve through our lives through our experiences. Experiences are how we integrate the different aspects of us. As Dan Siegel describes so beautifully in the beginning of his book “The Whole Brain Child” we are integrating all the different parts of our brains and nervous systems through each experience. We are constantly, literally rewiring our brains with every experience.  I have come to realize that we integrate our experiences best through our awareness, utilizing its ability to both have or be the experience as it happens, and at the same time witness the Self that is aware of it.

Animal Instincts

Animals instinctively release or let go of the energies of their hard experiences after a traumatic encounter, often by shaking until it’s released. As humans we have become so disconnected from our bodily sensations, our lived and felt experience, that much of the time this energy remains trapped inside of us.

Awareness as a Bridge

However, through our awareness and the power of our imagination we can go back and complete the processes in the body, all the while gaining new insights through the exploration of our experiences on a multitude of different levels and perspectives. Awareness is the bridge that lets us expand or reach beyond the current experience we are having into something that is greater than the sum of the parts alone. For children and adults alike, experience is the avenue to building resilience and maturation.  Awareness is our most powerful tool as a human being, we may re-experience or do over any experience so that we might step beyond it into a greater version of ourselves.

What is Awareness?

I often like to start my articles by exploring what our dictionaries or commonly accepted definitions of things are. I sometimes like to touch on where the words come from, their etymology, to see how we as a society of come to understand and make meaning from them.  What meaning society derives from its experiences is certainly a reflection of what we as its members have made our experiences mean.  A reflection of our collective experience. This practice brings awareness to what meaning we have created in the language we use.

I always find this exercise interesting as I have my own understanding of these words, they are always a bit different from what I find written in the dictionaries. I tend to connect more to the roots of the words meaning, rather than our current take on them.

Consciousness

I thought I would start out with the meanings of Consciousness. From the Oxford Living Dictionary by Way of Wikipedia consciousness is defined as:

“The state of being aware of and responsive to one’s surroundings.”

VeryWellMind Defines consciousness as:

“Consciousness is the individual awareness of your unique thoughts, memories, feelings, sensations, and environments. Essentially, your consciousness is your awareness of yourself and the world around you.”

As a simplified definition I might summarize consciousness as simply:

“the awareness of all parts of our experience of life”

Awareness

Now let’s look at how we define Awareness itself. From the Merriam-Webster Dictionary.

“the quality or state of being aware : knowledge and understanding that something is happening or exists”

Wikipedia has some great expansions on the ideas of Awareness. Here is just a small piece of it.

“Awareness is also associated with consciousness in the sense that this concept denotes a fundamental experience such as a feeling or intuition that accompanies the experience of phenomena. Specifically, this is referred to as awareness of experience. As for consciousness, it has been postulated to undergo continuously changing levels.^”

Interestingly with these words I feel more connected to our current definition of them. Looking at the etymology there is more of a hint of caution or worry associated with the term “aware”. I suppose we as a whole are less concerned with physical survival at this point in history than we were before, at least in much of western society.

Self-Awareness – A Key Tool

As a counsellor and person who has dedicated his life to the expansion of consciousness and awareness, I look to explore how we can use awareness to expand ourselves, create more joy and acceptance within ourselves, our families, our communities and our societies.   I see personal-awareness as the key tool to more peace within ourselves. Once we reduce the amount of fighting, we do inside ourselves, the less we will need and want to fight outside ourselves. 

Awareness is both our ability to shift our focus, and the part of us that does the focusing.

An Experience of Awareness

Or download an MP3 of the Experience

Download MP3

I believe that if an image is worth a 1,000 words, a personal experience is worth a 1,000,000 words.

Learn More about the Experiences offered here at Totality Counselling

Awareness of Mind

Being aware of our minds is extremely powerful, it is a key to transformation or change. I want to point out an important difference between being aware of our thought’s verses analyzing our thoughts.  In the not-so-distant past I was someone who lived in his head. I believed the way out of all my unhappiness, all the conflict in my relationships, all the anger and disappointment I felt, was to figure out a way I could think my way out of it. If I just analyzed my problems better, just came up with a better solution then it would all be ok.

In a way I was right, clear thinking is essential to integration of our whole selves, but we must rise to new levels of thinking to integrate in way that is truly transformative.  We must balance both halves of the equation, clear thinking as well as clear emotions, calm in our bodies. Thought is hugely powerful, but what we often mistake for thinking is actually feeling disguised as thought. In my case I thought I was rationally looking at my life, how I was interacting with others, I thought that I was right in my thinking and they were wrong, regardless of right or wrong thinking I was not peaceful in my body, I was at odds with my emotions.

What I’ve come to understanding is that right or wrong is mostly subjective. Most of us believe we are doing right from our own perspective. My personal belief is that we should do our best to honor others, to treats others kindly, with as much understanding that we can. It seems to me, forced morality will never work, morality is an inner personal choice. Peace can’t come from outside of us, it’s an inner experience. Paradoxically the more safety we create for people on the outside, the easier it is for others to find safety within, it just needs to be given freely. This doesn’t mean we shouldn’t protect and care for others to the best of our abilities, that is how the world changes for the better.  

Albert Einstein – Internal Space and Powerful Thinking

I believe one of the greatest thinkers in the last 100 years knew this. Albert Einstein could think and reason at a level few have attained in the academic world. I believe it was his awareness that enabled him to think at the level he did. His ability to perceive beyond his mind. Einstein is often credited with this quote:

“We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.”

I believe what he was referring to was awareness, that we solve our problems from an expanded mind, a mind that see’s the problem from another view point, one not impacted by fearful emotions. This is done through the integration of emotion and mind, expanding into something beyond them both. Awareness is the part of us that can hold both sides, our thinking and emotion, it can help us step beyond our current perspectives.

Awareness – Going Beyond Our Thoughts

Awareness is the part of us that can continually step back further and further from everything we are experiencing.  Awareness allows us to step back from our thoughts, enabling us to understand why we have them, and where they come from. It creates the space necessary to see our internal system. To see our patterns of thinking. These systems of thinking create our perceptions, our beliefs and mental concepts. We use these concepts as our model for navigating our world.  Awareness empowers us to decide if those models of thinking serve us, or if deciding something new would be the best way to create the experiences we want to have in our lives.

An Example of how Awareness brings New Solutions

An example of how awareness creates space for new solutions might look something like this. Let’s say we are trying to solve a problem at work, we are trying to fix a bug in our software that interfaces or talks to another part of the software.  Just as easily this could be two teams of people that need to talk to each other. We can’t figure out why the two pieces of software won’t connect. We’ve had some bad experiences with the lead programmer of the other team, so we are hesitant to ask for their help.  We talk to our manager, who suggests we talk to the lead programmer; we share about our resistance to having that conversation. Our manager shares a story about the programmer that sheds light on why they are the way they are, why they act like they do. Our manager tells us they lost a child a couple of years ago, they haven’t been the same since. Having this information, we come to a new awareness of the bigger picture of this person. As a parent ourselves we feel compassion for what they must have gone through. Our view or perspective of them has changed, not entirely but a little. With this new experience of them, we go and speak with them, holding this new concept of them. During the conversation they make a small suggestion that fixes our programming issue with 20 minutes of work.

This is an example of how awareness helps transform our perspective of another person, it works the same way internally. When we gather new information or a greater awareness of a situation, we feel differently about it, our internal relationship to the situation or person changes. This often leads to a broader way of viewing the same challenges, it also often helps relax or calm strong emotions associated with a situation.  Like the example above, internal awareness is often facilitated through another person, in this case our manager. Others can’t transform us, but they can point the way.

Awareness by any other name is still Powerful

We have come up with many different ways to describe awareness and how we use it. A few of them are:

In all cases we direct the focus of our awareness through the use of our Will or will-power. To utilize awareness begins as a choice we make again and again, until it becomes a habit.

Many of us have had experiences in our past that have disconnected us from our Will power. We may need help to reconnect ourselves to it.

Awareness  – Encompassing All our Abilities to Perceive 

Awareness enables us to step outside our emotional experiences, to straddle the experience of our emotions in our bodies, and the aspect of us that is behind our emotions, that holds the emotional experience. Awareness allows us to witness the energy of our emotions flowing through our bodies, through our nervous systems, in a way that allows us to both experience it and be beyond it. The beginning of this process of experiencing the experience of this flow of energy is facilitated by another who is able to feel with us.

Ideally this starts in childhood through a loving parent or another safe person, often this comes later in life through a friend, loving partner or professional. Through the safe space created between two people, we learn to build safety and trust within ourselves. Through another we build a relationship with the loving aspect of us, the us that is beyond our thinking and emotion, our core self.

Our awareness is the aspect of us, that connects all the different levels or aspect of our being. It connects us to our core, the core that can feel our emotions without being 100% swept away by them. As our nervous system becomes more regulated, less triggered and activated by our experience, we gain more and more access to our core self, it becomes more and more natural. Through safety, within and without, there is less and less pulling us out of core.  

We come to experience ourselves as something larger than our feelings alone. This inner calm enables us to consciously choose the State of Being or experience of life we have, more and more of the time. More and more of our days are filled with the peace that being aware of, but not consumed by our emotions and thoughts bring.

Our conscious ability to choose joy rather than hardship grows and becomes our natural State or experience more and more of the time. Through awareness we are empowered to choose love rather than fear. This process creates a positive cycle inside us, our loving parts care for the upset parts, more and more of our upset parts release their upset and become peaceful helpful parts inside of us. As we experience fewer upset parts inside, we experience greater and greater peace within. This leaves us with fewer and fewer upset parts inside to be taken care of.  Just as our upset parts can upset other parts inside us, creating greater and greater disharmony within, more loving parts inside us can love the upset parts creating more and more harmony within. We can create momentum towards harmony or disharmony, it’s not easy but it is our choice. Safety enables more safety; safety enables more choice. By making sense of the chaos inside of us we return to harmony, order and safety inside. We create an inner system of safety, that can take care of itself more and more of the time.

Awareness as a State of Being

What is a State of Being? I would describe it as the overall experience we are having in a moment. We can experience ourselves in the state of happiness, joy, upset, the state of anxiety, overwhelm, jealousy, anger, peace or awareness.  We know what state we are in through our bodily sensations or experience in our bodies.

Whatever our State of Being is currently, it will influence what we feel next. It will also filter or color the next thoughts we have.  If you think about it, how we experience something is really our reality of life. Our State of Being is how life experiences itself, we know life through our experiences.  When we change our State of Being we change our experience of life, we change our current reality.

Awareness as a State of Being is something we can choose. I recognize it’s a bold statement but we can choose what state of being we are in at any given moment.  This isn’t easy to do, but we can move towards it more and more of the time. Our ability to choose our State of Being increases as we exercise that ability. The more we choose awareness and shine its light on the things that makes it hard to choose, the easier it becomes to choose. Another beautiful paradox, the more we consciously choose something the more natural or easier it becomes. What we practice becomes easier.

Awareness becomes our pivot point, the pause that enables choice in what we will choose next.

Awareness – A Gift of our Soul or Spirit?

As a therapist I believe it’s important to bring myself into my work, never in way that implies others should think or feel the way I do, but as way of sharing my experience with the intention to potentially inspire others through what I have gained through my own awareness of my own experiences.   Who we are as people is a gift when given without expectation, this is how I choose to approach my work.

At this point in the article, you might be thinking, hey awareness sounds lot like how I understand my Soul to be, it seems like the more I am connected to my awareness the more I have access to my intuition, the part of me that just knows and understands things without knowing how or why. My experience is the same, to me the part of us that is beyond our thoughts and feelings, even our experiences, seems like a soul to me. My aim with my writing is for it to be accessible to as many people as possible while still carrying the essence of my truth. We use definition to make sense of our world and our experience of it, so if understanding awareness as an aspect of Soul or spirit does that for you wonderful, and if it doesn’t then discard it. Awareness can just as easily be understood as the greater aspects of our minds and nervous systems. I believe that whatever empowers people to greater self-acceptance, greater compassion and great understanding is what serves them best at any given time.

Before I move on, I will share something I realized about a year ago. If you look at the etymology, or origin of a meaning of the word “psyche” the base of the word psychology it reads: (taken from etymonline.com)

“1640s, “animating spirit, the human spirit or mind,” from Latin psyche, from Greek psykhē “the soul, mind, spirit; life, one’s life, the invisible animating principle or entity which occupies and directs the physical body; understanding, the mind (as the seat of thought), faculty of reason,” also “ghost, spirit of a dead person;” probably akin to psykhein “to blow, breathe,” also “to cool, to make dry.”

In modern times in many ways, we have come to see psychology as mental health and that is a huge part of it; however, I like to incorporate all its aspects.  By seeing ourselves as whole beings, the totality of our experience within and in relation to the outer world.

I would argue that Awareness is what makes us human. Our Awareness or ability to reflect on our experience is our consciousness. We are sentient beings, more than mere machines.

Interestingly the word “Sentience” means “the quality of being able to experience feelings. It’s meaning is linked to the word “sense”.

As I’ve stated above its very powerful to learn and expand our knowledge and understanding of words and their meaning. Language is a big part of our internal system that filters and interrupts our experiences of life.

Only when we know or are aware of something do we actually have choice in it. The choices we make subconsciously, are essentially choices we make without knowing why we make them. Awareness is how we take that power back.

Originally this article had a final section that laid out different levels of awareness. A way to conceptualize awareness with a little structure.  I believe systems or ways of thinking can support us by adding to our own perceptions, but it’s important not to lose ourselves in them, they can too easily become our new masters. Due to the already unwieldy length of this article, I will share about these level of awareness in another article.

Summing Up the Power of Awareness

We can’t address or change a problem or challenge, if we aren’t even aware of its existence.  Awareness is what makes us human, it is the part of us that can rise above or step outside our experiences so that we may evolve through them.

Awareness of thought, belief and what we experience emotionally through our nervous systems is the tool or mechanism through which we go beyond what we experience as life now, to all that it can be. Awareness enables or empowers us to consciously decide on a new experience of life and our relationships, fundamentally changing our reality.

“The basic for any approach to self-transformation is an ever-increasing awareness of reality and the shedding of illusions.”
— Erich Fromm