There’s an old expression that says that if you carry on doing what you’ve always done, you’ll continue to get what you’ve always got. Another one is, if you don’t change direction you’ll end up where you’re headed! The message seems to be, get what’s going on and make a change. You take charge of the situation and make a shift. Fine, provided you get it.
The ability to change direction in some area of your life depends in large part on your ability to become aware of what is happening, and to see your part in it. This is a process of becoming aware and taking responsibility for how you are showing up. The first part in this process is awareness.
If we lack self-awareness, we fail to notice how we ourselves are contributing to situations that occur. It can seem as though it is other people, the context or the situation that “makes us” feel and think the way we do. This is in part due to our early life experiences that taught us that other people and circumstances seemed to control our lives. Our learnings as children were creative adjustments to these events and thus we built the superstructure of the Ego as a survival mechanism, our personality, who we identified with, to enable us to cope with what came up. This, we believed, was who we are.
If we lack self-awareness, we are caught up in the vicissitudes of life, reactive to what happens, impacting others, events and situations in ways we do not fully understand. In fact, I would go further and say that we are unable to see how we create what happens to us and therefore neglect the real creative potential that we possess.
To become self-aware is to initiate a revolution that enables us to truly take control of our life. It is said that within us lies the answers to everything, if we only cared to take a look.
The art of being self-aware starts with developing your sensitivity to yourself. It involves being able to read what your body is telling you, being aware of how you feel, noticing the subtle sensations within you. This is when it helps to do some body work so as to open up this sensitivity. Feelings are the language of the soul, telling us what in our essence we truly need. These messages contain clues to what is going on for us. Then we apply self-enquiry, asking ourselves what the message is, pausing and checking within. For example, you can stop and simply go within and ask yourself what it is that you need to be aware of right now, and then wait for the answer to come – as it will with practice. Focusing is a useful skill here.
Beyond that, you can develop self-awareness by getting familiar with what your familiar patterns of feeling and thinking are, where you typically go when certain things happen, how you tend to react, what you tend to feel and think when you get “on it” about something. You can, through self-enquiry, learn what the triggers of these reactions are and what buttons in you set them off. You can learn where, in turn, those come from and why. Often we have made early decisions in life about who we are, about life and other people on which, outside of awareness, we then act. These decisions were made before we were old enough to think for ourselves and rationalise. When, later, we do rationalise it is then based on false premises. Now’s the time to let this go, simply because it probably no longer serves us, or at least exercise more choice.
Doing this inner work clears out the rubbish of the ego. Then we can see who we are authentically and come to like and love that in us. It’s like we’re OK after all. We can discover a whole new joy and enthusiasm about ourselves, about life and about what’s possible. Then we are able to use our true creativity to build far better things for ourselves. This doesn’t mean that stuff no longer comes up. It still does, but it no longer has a hold over us and, with the ability to be aware and to discriminate, we can learn to hold to our centre of Being and let that grow in our lives. Then our creativity will be based on purer foundations, in an awareness of who we truly are. Then we have true power.
In the next few months I’ll be writing about the theme of creativity in preparation for a major new workshop I’ll be running in the Autumn in London on “Creating your Reality”.
You can also read more about Self-awareness in an article I’ve written by clicking here.
Subscribe to Meditations of a Life Coach by Email
0 comments:
Post a Comment