Awareness

Journey to Inner Wisdom

Welcome to this episode of a journey to inner wisdom…it is all about awareness today…well mostly if I can stay on topic! There are other words that I will interchange with awareness…attention and awake for example…but I will always relate to awareness.

I hope you had a chance to consider the transitions that you have or are going through in your life and how you are going or have gone through them. And have you noticed any fractals on your daily journey? I was out walking, looking into the canopy atop the forest and the patterns are amazing. I have parsley growing in my greenhouse and the patterns are wonderful.

I always like to start by looking at the word itself and where it came from.

1828 - Aware – late old English – watchful, vigilant

-Ness -denotes action, quality, or state

1752 – awaredom

Today: Merriam-Webster Dictionary

knowledge and understanding that something is happening or exists

situational awareness is simply knowing what is going on around us and being able to assess how it will impact the near future. Like driving, or cooking or walking, and seeing a dog!

I know, you are thinking, ‘that is so obvious…. of course I am aware of what is happening!’ “I know that I am listening to this podcast…I know I am also driving or walking or making dinner.’

Think for a moment of a time you were driving or going somewhere on the subway or a train and suddenly you wonder, “how did I get here? Did I go through a red light? Did I miss my stop? We often run on automatic in our busy world.

Tony DeMello once said:

Most people even though they don’t know it, are asleep. They are born asleep, they live asleep, they marry in their sleep, they breed in their sleep, they die in their sleep without even waking up. They never understand the loveliness, - beauty of this thing called human existence.

- George Gurdjieff.

“Awakening is possible only for those who seek it and want it, for those who are ready to struggle with themselves and work on themselves for a very long time and very persistently in order to attain it.”

Sometimes we have numbed ourselves in order to avoid pain or face a difficult situation. We can do that with substances, work, gaming, or disconnecting from the now. When we do this, we are not present to the present…it is like we are a wraith going through life and not engaging with life.

- George Gurdjieff.

“In order to awaken, first of all one must realize that one is in a state of sleep.”

There is the rub!!! We often don’t realize that we are asleep.

According to Deepak Chopra, awakening happens when you are no longer living in a dream world where you filter everything through your ego and focus on the future and the past. Instead, you have an almost simultaneous awareness of your individual self and the connection between that and everything else. This is beyond situational awareness! Richard Rohr

Our job as conscious humans is to bring the beauty and goodness of everything to full consciousness, to full delight, to full awareness.

Conscious and unconscious are really what I am talking about when I talk about awareness. According to Alfred Adler, “The unconscious is nothing other than that which we have been unable to formulate into clear concepts

If we are sleeping through our lives, what is it that we must wake up to in order to fully engage in our way of being…in our deeper way of knowing.

In order to do this, we must go beyond just knowing and understanding that something is happening or existing. We need to go beyond situational awareness which can be called the first order of knowing…we notice and maybe do a bit of reflection and conclude that we understand what is going on around us.

When we go deeper into what more is happening besides what meets the eye or any other sense for that matter, we may begin to notice more than our conscious mind can register. Our perception actually gives what is happening a twist, a tint, a bit of an interpretation that others do not have. I am often not even aware of the twist or bias of my own perception. It falls in the realm of I don’t know what I don’t know and resides in my unconscious.

Let’s explore what deeper awareness may look like. In education and psychology, we talk about cognition and metacognition. Cognition is comprised of our mental processes, our conscious mental activities – thinking understanding learning, and remembering. Metacognition is the awareness of one’s own learning or thinking processes.

What if we could enter into the realm of meta-awareness and observe how we pay attention and react to the world around us? What if by entering into the deeper level or second-order awareness, we become aware that our unique perspective on the world is our own creation and we can change that perception at any time. We can do this because we created it in the first place. Okay, I am already talking about beliefs and perception and am jumping to the next episode!!!

When I shift from situational awareness and enter into the field of meta-awareness, as DeMello states I wake up and I begin to notice what is going on at a deeper level, and then I am able to shift my perspective. I now have more choices. I begin to notice patterns. As de Mello states, “that is what wisdom means: to be changed without the slightest effort of your part, to be transformed believe it or not, merely by waking to reality that is not words, that lies beyond the reach of words.”

How do we shift to meta-awareness? There are many roads to meta-awareness – yoga, meditation, guided retreats, therapy, energy work, coaching, The awareness exercise, to name a few. I have used all of these and perhaps the simplest way to develop your meta-awareness is by using the Awareness Exercise. I was first introduced to a form of the Awareness exercise on a 7-day silent retreat 40 years ago. I have used it myself and with retreatants as well as taught it at workshops over the decades. It will take you into meta-awareness when used consistently.

So to reiterate…Meta-awareness involves waking up to what’s going on with us – with our thoughts, our feelings, our body sensations, and impulses – in each moment. We are simultaneously ‘in’ our experience (feeling and sensing what’s going on) and at the same time, we’re able to notice some of the ways it’s unfolding for us.

When we have that awareness, then we can choose what we do next. When we don’t have it, we’re stuck in the rut of our familiar, habitual reactions.

Meta awareness: How do we pay attention?

Whatever tools of awareness that we use, what is important is that we are paying attention with all of our senses, our head, heart and gut, our imagination and memory, and our intuition.

Our senses will give us a cursory inventory of what is happening around us. What we see, hear, taste touch, and smell. Our brain is directly involved with interpreting what our senses sense.

Our energy centers, our heart, our head, and our gut, will take us to deeper levels.

Our heart will reveal our emotional response, both positive and negative, to what is/has happened. One of the big obstacles is that we often don’t pay attention to our negative emotions and sometimes overemphasize our positive emotions. When we are in meta-awareness we can ...